i am waiting for more popular distros like linux Mint to start using btrfs . I am not getting into the technical side of whats better. But as a noob user i wouldn’t bother myself messing around with the filesystem unless my distro (i.e linux mint) has default support for it.
It is also not straight forward to set up btrfs on linux mint and with luks turned on my systems.
If in future when i feel comfortable enough to setup i might use it on my main computer. Also I have fedora and opensuse (which supports btrfs by default) in the past , but Mint is my choice for now.
I believe it has strong foundation. Although I didn’t proof it myself. We can see in the video that I sent before the benchmarks and I have a friend that tested running Fedora 39 Monster Hunter World in ext4 and btfrs. He got 163 avg FPS in btrfs and 178 avg FPS in ext4 same exact setups. The thing is that btrfs is very inefficient when writing or re-writing the disk.
Maybe someone can test it as well and check if this is true but it seems logical that those additional features from the file system would have some collateral effects in the file storage performance.
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It doesn’t make sense, even an HDD compared to a modern SSD wouldn’t have such a performance difference when gaming. The only downside would be the loading times.
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Honest, now that you mention I don’t think the numbers makes sense. A game cannot be impacted that much during most time because the game normally operates in reading mode. So, apologizes, if I added some weird noise to this discussion.
Currently I use ext4 on Linux, but that’s on a hard drive and not a solid state drive. Personally haven’t had any major issues with ext4 and the times where I have had to force shutdown or whatever haven’t caused any file corruption.
Half seriously though - ext4 is a cooler name than btrfs, which was a good reason for me to pick it as my fs 
.
Also, just to note, I’m pretty sure Android uses ext4 as well (granted Android has some other resiliency features that are not present in many Linux desktops, and had A/B updates, immutability etc before Linux desktops).
Aren’t there issues with BTRFS and file level encryption?
Unlike Ext4, Btrfs does not support encryption on the file system level. However, you can use third-party methods to encrypt a Btrfs filesystem.
Is this something Veracrypt realistically solves for? Is there an advantage to EXT4 file system level encryption? I’m not as well versed in this area, so I’m not sure of the pros/cons here.
For an external drive
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ext4 and btrfs are non-portable and insecure choices for an external drive.
Is there any very simple explanation of this?
Its interesting that Fedora still use BTRFS as default.
they are not portable between machines.
This is more interesting. What he means about portability? You can not mount a BTRFS volume (or its complex) to another computer? Or he just mentions that BTRFS is supported only by few OS as default ?
Hi, I’m no authority in the field and obviously I don’t want to go against the GrapheneOS project, however, just to be short, and for those that visit and contribute to this forum someone needs to challenge this view. We can’t simple start using Windows and MacOS because they are more secure sacrificing completely our privacy and ideals.
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All of GrapheneOS’s criticism of ext4 and btrfs’s security is specifically in reference to its use as external storage:
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Being non-journaling is an issue with exFAT - I wouldn’t use it. If anything the risk of data loss is much bigger than whatever theoretical concern may exist with ext4.
It’s highly unsafe loading an untrusted ext4 or btrfs filesystem
I wish they’d clarify on why that is so. Just because the driver for these filesystems is implemented on the kernel and it’s more complex?
Overall I prefer ext4 as it’s probably still the safer choice, and I don’t need the extra features that btrfs provides.
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Doesn’t exFAT also not support Linux ACLs, or extended attributes like Selinux labels, which would make it unsuitable for many applications in Linux systems?
I think we should be using ZFS? But ZFS on Linux is still a bit young, relative to the original BSD implementation of ZFS. But TrueNAS seems to think its mature enough.
Does anyone think the post seem to imply that the Graphene team wants LUKS instead?
Yes, but even with external storage I still wouldn’t use it over ext4/btrfs or NTFS
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