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View Poll Results: Which Is Your Preferred Linux File System?
EXT4 seems to handle crashes well. My wife's laptop crashes daily, sometimes multiple times a day. It doesn't charge and the power cord is messed up. Still the system boots and runs fine. EXT4 even handled crashes during stress testing on my new system.
I had tried ReiserFS on my laptop some years ago. After one crash (dead battery), the filesystem was completely trashed.
The only issue I've had with XFS had something to do with conflicting/duplicate UUIDs, but was easily corrected. I only had one HDD with XFS though.
FAT32 needs to die already.
XFS does not handle crashes as well as EXT3 or EXT4
Distribution: openSuSE Tumbleweed-KDE, Mint 21, MX-21, Manjaro
Posts: 4,629
Rep:
I voted ext4, but that might be changing. openSuSE goes btrfs (system) and xfs (userdata). I'll try that and see. Certainly ext4 never gave me trouble, fast during fsck and reliable as a rock.
I first started using linux it was ext2, then ext3, and now ext4. This was the default that came with the distro.
It always works.
Have used salix with xfs.
I prefer ZFS (unfortunately still just user space on linux) for reasons of simplicity, reliability, and flexibility. It scales beyond anything I could through at it, but does make heavy use of RAM for combining writes before flushing to disk.
COW, elimination of volume management and fsck, and snapshot/rollback and send/recv technology rocks the socks off other FS for ease of use alone.
I never had any trouble with ext2, but if I am correct is was not a journal-ling file system. ext4 was what I picked on my last install and it has given me very little trouble....altough the little trouble it has given me makes me think back to the days of ext2....times change though, and you can't be a Luddite forever.
Jimi C
Funny, I didn't read any comments or view the results prior to voting. Minor hesitation where I stopped myself from picking something I'd always wanted to try. And then just picked what I've always used ext4. Then I saw the poll results.
Right. I probably started with ext2, but it soon became ext4 and that's the most popular to me. Rarely had problems with it either. I've used XFS on a flash product. Not sure if it really mattered over the techniques we chose to ensure that we didn't write heavily to the flash as opposed to what the file system was.
as for the stupid question: Can anyone tell me the difference between ext3 and ext4 on a kernel level? I know they are both journalist file systems, and that they beat the fu*k out of windows crap, but why am I using ext4 not ext3? is it better? why? what is the assembly code that makes this better than old ext2......I update, I see faster results, but I don't know the nuts and bolts of it.
thanks
jimi C
Thanks JZL24OI-U, most enlightening. now you got me wondering what my dmss security dvr is running for a fs, I'll find out though, thanks for the links!
JFS is also mature technology just as I and my systems are mature. Some day EXT4 will grow up and emerge from beta-testing but until then I will choose JFS for systems that matter.
I use JFS on all of my systems (SSD included) and have never regretted it. Not being able to re-size is a potential drawback, but in practise it has not been an issue. The filesystem performs well, is stable, and I'm quite pleased with it in general.
Since we know Linux is for Geeks, and there's probably a reason but for us real worlders what's the difference and why should we care. Is this a coresponding issue for Apple users?
Long answer:
This is a performance issue and an issue of particular features of a filesystem you want/need. Apple users don't consider any of these points. They just take whatever Apple sells an don't ask for (better) alternatives. After buying, they take their vendor's word that it's the best possible an put on their blinkers so they don't see the real world and just continue in their own Second Life one.
But there is another thing about filesystems that would have to be considered: Apple users don't want performance or features. They just want their computer to be pretty. So the attributes of the filesystem are irrelevant. The computer could even be pretty without the filesystem. (That's one more thing (read: less), Apple is going to sell for double the price it's worth soon.)
So at the end it all boils down to the short answer.
Short answer:
No, iStupid! (the user-friendly, Apple intelligence level answer)
Fully back on topic, now:
I considered jfs once and didn't quite like the "features". Have used Reiser quite a bit, but if you're ever bothered to try to undelete data that some Apple user equivalent deleted, you're screwed, really. Have used ext# for a while and it does what I want/need mostly. I still have an xfs partition on one PC because I used to record Movies and only after that compress them. So I needed support for massive files and that system did it. BTRFS sounds promising but unfinished. We'll have to wait and see.
Voted for ext4.
I remember using ext2 back in the day. I also remember if you didn't shutdown a linux system with ext2 properly, some files can be corrupted. I remember I had to re-install linux because some files got corrupted and it wouldn't boot up. Not linux fault, I was new to linux and did some heavy tweaking and it occasionally froze the system or the programs, thus forcing me to do a few hard resets.
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