i’ve instaled opensuse tumbleweed a bunch of times in the last few years, but i always used ext4 instead of btrfs because of previous bad experiences with it nearly a decade ago. every time, with no exceptions, the partition would crap itself into an irrecoverable state
this time around i figured that, since so many years had passed since i last tried btrfs, the filesystem would be in a more reliable state, so i decided to try it again on a new opensuse installation. already, right after installation, os-prober failed to setup opensuse’s entry in grub, but maybe that’s on me, since my main system is debian (turns out the problem was due to btrfs snapshots)
anyway, after a little more than a week, the partition turned read-only in the middle of a large compilation and then, after i rebooted, the partition died and was irrecoverable. could be due to some bad block or read failure from the hdd (it is supposedly brand new, but i guess it could be busted), but shit like this never happens to me on extfs, even if the hdd is literally dying. also, i have an ext4 and an ufs partition in the same hdd without any issues.
even if we suppose this is the hardware’s fault and not btrfs’s, should a file system be a little bit more resilient than that? at this rate, i feel like a cosmic ray could set off a btrfs corruption. i hear people claim all the time how mature btrfs is and that it no longer makes sense to create new ext4 partitions, but either i’m extremely unlucky with btrfs or the system is in fucking perpetual beta state and it will never change because it is just good enough for companies who can just, in the case of a partition failure, can just quickly switch the old hdd for a new one and copy the nightly backup over to it
in any case, i am never going to touch btrfs ever again and i’m always going to advise people to choose ext4 instead of btrfs
Copy on write and compression are two really good whistles, though.
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.
Myself and many others have found lots of use in these features. If it’s not important to you that’s fine, but there ARE reasons many of us default to btrfs now.
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?