Yozul

Sure, if it’s making your life easier or making you happy or whatever, then have it. Don’t let me yuck your yum. I just think it doesn’t provide any real benefit for most people. Am I not allowed to talk about my opinion?

Copy on write is pretty overrated for most use cases. It’d be nice to have, but I don’t find it’s worth the bother. Disk compression and snapshots have had solutions for longer than btrfs has existed, so I don’t understand why I’d want to cram them into an otherwise worse file system and call it an improvement. I will admit that copy on write and snapshots do at least have a little synergy together, but storage has gotten to be one of the cheapest parts of a computer. I’d rather just have a real backup.

You know file systems are not the only way to do that, right? Heck, Timeshift is explicitly designed to do that easily and automatically without ever even having to look at a command line. Backup before upgrade is a weird thing to cram into a file system.

I mean, unless you really like one of the weird bells and whistles btrfs supports ext4 is just faster and more reliable. If you don’t have weird power user needs then anything else is a downgrade. Even ZFS really only makes a significant difference if you’re moving around gigabytes of data on a daily basis. If you’re on a BSD anyway feel free to go for it, but for most people there is no real benefit. Every other fancy new file system is just worse for typical desktop use cases. People desperately want to replace ext4 because it’s old, but there’s just really nothing to gain from it. Sometimes simple and reliable is good.