I lost data with Btrfs, whereas ext4 has been rock solid for many years. No thanks.
i had many friends who were very vocal about btrfs. most of them lost their data at one point, with btrfs, due to data corruption.
Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#12It already is. OpenSUSE and Fedora both use brtfs by default now. It’s by far the most sensible fs for modern desktop usage and a killer feature of Linux.
To be precise about the "now": Fedora switched to btrfs by default a couple of years ago. OpenSUSE has been using btrfs by default for at least a decade.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#13I’ve heard it lacks maturity and of a few cases of data corruption. Those cases are no doubt outdated now, but I haven’t heard any news to sway me that BTRFS is ready for prime time. Ditto for ZFS btw.
zfs is way simpler to manage than btrfs.
also, there does not seem to be a proper guide to btrfs. only random of bits and bytes here and there.
zfs on the other hand is very well documented.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#141 - increased complexity, makes troubleshooting harder
2 - higher risk of losing data
3 - harder to explain and understand vs ext4.
4 - has more special needs. in some cases you need way more free storage for rebalancing stuff around... you don't need that for ex4.
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now ext4 is surely worse than btrfs... but for the average home user btrfs is more of a problem than a solution, probably.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#15How often are people reevaluating their file system choice? As excited as Linux users tend to be about the little things, the file system is so close to being unnoticeable day-to-day that it’s not worth the hassle when the current one works perfectly fine.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#16I’ve heard it lacks maturity and of a few cases of data corruption. Those cases are no doubt outdated now, but I haven’t heard any news to sway me that BTRFS is ready for prime time. Ditto for ZFS btw.
ZFS is stable and solid. It's hold up is licensing. ZFS isn't licensed in a way that can be included in the Linux kernel distribution. Plus, my understanding is that Linus Torvalds has a dislike of ZFS because it came from Sun Microsystems.
What problem did Linus have with Sun? Oracle I understand, but Sun? Was it something to do with UNIX?
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#17The rule of thumb is that a filesystem needs about a decade or so[0] to iron out the bugs and become reliable enough for regular use by regular users. Btrfs is 14 years old which means it's old enough to start getting adopted, but changing the default filesystem in a distro is not a particularly quick process, since most people simply don't care about most of the advanced features. Plus since data loss is such a feared problem, any anecdotes about it will cause a massive hit to the filesystem's reputation, regardless of the anecdote's validity. Right now Fedora and OpenSUSE use btrfs by default, likely because they're upstreams of enterprise distros where users will use those advanced features, so Red Hat and SUSE want to make sure it's as solid as possible before potentially rolling it out to paying customers.
Personally, I'm a happy user of btrfs installed by default by Fedora and haven't had any problems with it, but I'm also not using any of the advanced features.
[0] Source: casual conversation and poorly remembered anecdotes
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#18I would love to learn why ZFS and BTRFS are competing to a common-ish goal?
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#19I would love to learn why ZFS and BTRFS are competing to a common-ish goal?
ZFS came first and Oracle started btrfs to try to clone it, before they acquired Sun anyway.
btrfs has never really matured. It has only a fraction of the features of ZFS and generally a lot more unstable.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?
#20I would love to learn why ZFS and BTRFS are competing to a common-ish goal?
They were created by different people at different companies with incompatible licenses for different operating systems. In my personal and very speculative opinion, if BTRFS didn't have a reputation for eating data and ZFS wasn't licensed in a way that's not quite compatible with the Linux kernel, one of them would have won by now.