There’s been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list… Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.
FAT32 does not just work for my Linux OS.
To people who just want to browse the web, use Office applications and a few other things, ext4 just works and FAT32 really just doesn’t.
I get the point you’re trying to make, FAT32 also has a small file size and is missing some features, ext4 is like that to for instance Bcachefs.
But FAT32 (and exFAT and a few others) have a completely different use cases; I couldn’t use FAT32 for Linux and expect it to work, I also couldn’t use ext4 for my USB stick and expect it to just work as a USB stick.
I also couldn’t use ext4 for my USB stick and expect it to just work as a USB stick.
Why not? It can be adapted to a smaller drive size fairly easily during filesystem creation.
True, but for me and many others USBs are also just massively portable. Since macOS, Windows and many others (phones, consoles, smart TVs…) don’t speak ext4 but do all speak FAT32 and exFAT, that makes exFAT the way to go on USB drives.
No. You can layer ext4 with LVM and LUKS to get a lot of features (but not all) that you get with BTRFS or ZFS. FAT is not suitable for anything other than legacy stuff.
Like there’s not a bunch of stuff EXT 4 can’t do that BTRFS and whatever this other acronym soup can do.
It’s the entire point of my post. E x t 4 does work but it doesn’t do the stuff these other file systems do so they are an advantageous choice for some things.
One point: ext4 has a maximum file size of 16TiB. To a regular user that is stupidly huge and of no concern but it’s exactly the type of thing you overlook if you “just use ext4” on anything and everything then end up with your database broken at work because of said bad advice.
Use the filesystem that makes the most sense for your use case. Consider it every single time you format a disk. Don’t become complacent! Also fuck around with the new shit from time to time! I decided to format my Linux desktop partitions with btrfs over a decade ago and as a result I’m an excellent user of that filesystem but you know what? I’m thinking I’ll try bcachefs soon and fiddle around more with my zfs partition on my HTPC.
BTW: If you’re thinking about trying out btrfs I would encourage you to learn about it’s non-trivial maintenance tasks. btrfs needs you to fuck with it from time to time or you’ll run out of disk space “for no reason”. You can schedule cron jobs to take care of everything (as I have done) but you still need to learn how it all works. It’s not a “set it and forget it” FS like ext4.
I think we’re just talking about different priorities. For me stability is the most important in production. For you features seem to matter more. For me it’s enough if a file system can store, write, read and not lose files. I guess it depends on what the use case and the budget are.
