On 10/17/2016 04:49 AM, Michael Hamilton wrote:
Finally, I'm not determined to use btrfs. I'm moving up from 13.1. I'm evaluating Leap and Tumbleweed. It's a simple desktop, no RAID, one user. Would ext4 be a better choice?
There are always gainsayers who remember the early, buggy days of any software, be it KDE4, systemd, or BtrFS. I've kept with the kernel_stable and am now at 4.8.2-2.g7574477-default The structure of BtrFS was stabilized some while ago, later than the kernel of the 13.1/2 DVDs. You can't use those for emergency repair now. I use BtrFS for my rootfs. I have a 20G partition that is less than half full. But then my /boot, /usr/share, /opt, /srv, /var and /tmp are separate file systems. I also have snapshotting turned off. I understand all its benefits and I ran with it for a couple of years, but never needed it. For the most part I favour ReiserFS and XFS for a very simple reason. The fixed, preallocated ratio of inodes to data space we have in ext4 is the same pre-provisioning that we had in UNIX V6 of the early 1970s.. Yes, its a faster file system, more robust, has many more features, but its still stuck in that provisioning mode when every other B-tree based FS does dynamic provisioning. And yes that includes BtrFS, which to my mind is its greatest advantage and one that is hardly ever mentioned. That Ext4 is stuck in this 1970s mindset seems incredible to me. I can't call the developers 'stupid', they're not, there very smart and capable people, but they just have this incredible blind spot, perhaps because they are caught up in backward compatibility with Ext2 and Ext3. This isn't to say Ext4 is useless. It makes an excellent FS for the RootFS. The RootFS isn't, shouldn't be, with the kind of partitioning I have, a dynamic FS. Its full of a fairly predictable set of files once you remove /opt, /srv, /var and /tmp. In an ideal setting, an embedded system for example, that could be configured and made RO. (Well some of the config files could be symlinked. (Reality: a lot of /etc *is* symlinked into /var and /usr/share.) A lot of the Leap vs Tumbleweed vs 13.2 in immortal mode depends on your risk tolerance and your ancillary repository. I'm using 13.2 and see Tumbleweed as ho-hum simply because I make user of things like kernel_stable and other repositories to key things like Firefox more up-to-date. For me, Tumbleweed would be a regression. YMMV, but those ancillary repositories for your specific interests - photography is one of mine - are important. Probably more important that BtrFS or Ext4 for your RootFS. I keep telling myself that one day I'll change my BtrFS RootFS to Ext4, but that day never seems to come. The pain is never there. Even on a rainy winter day I have better things to do. Ext4 or BtrFS for your RootFS just isn't worth getting a later over so long as you have /opt, /srv, /var and /tmp as separate FS. And "oh what a coincidence!", on my system those are Ext4. So please don't think that I'm condemning Ext4. -- Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft. -- Robert Kennedy March 24, 1968 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org