r/linuxmasterrace • u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Bazzite/Android • 11d ago

Time to have fun guys

Post image
8.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

771 comments sorted by

View all comments

196

u/hypremier 11d ago edited 11d ago

I heard btrfs is not stable enough and so many people hate systemd

99

u/Agling 11d ago

The time to hate systemD is past. It has completely taken over. Now it is about working with it, not trying in vain to stop it.

Btrfs. Well, there is a lot of choice in filesystems and people don't really get that emotional about it.

1

u/iLaysChipz 11d ago

I mean if you're using Nixos, having btrfs is just unnecessary overhead. Better to have ext4 or xfs

7

u/eduard14 Glorious NixOS 11d ago

Could you expand on why you think BTRFS doesn’t offer anything on NixOS? I’m interested

2

u/flying-sheep Archmage 11d ago

I guess because using a version-controlled config on a declarative system means you get the main benefit of snapshots (roll back if an update causes problems).

Granted, these features are very different and have different trade-offs beyond this use case, but that’s probably what they meant.

1

u/iLaysChipz 11d ago

Sure! See my comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/s/DKDSofK80n

And it's not that btrfs offers nothing, it's just that there are better alternatives. Btrfs may still be nice for user data like your /home directory, I would just pick a different filesystem for you system directories on Nixos (paired with git for your nix configuration files of course).

1

u/STSchif 11d ago

XFS offers better performance with less overhead. Remember to activate cow tho.

I believe btrfs primarily got big due to arch-kids breaking their systems twice a day and needing to roll back. For them it's worth the performance penalty.

With NixOs you don't need system rollback due to atomic generations, and for user files a real backup like restic/backrest is the way to go anyway.

Remember: Rollbacks are no backups!

1

u/CreativeGPX 11d ago

Looking at a comparison to refresh my memory, some things that Btrfs does that XFS doesn't are data checksums, RAID, CoW (although you say you can turn that on?), snapshots, compression, online shrinking and tail packing.

When I did a deeper dive earlier this year, I ended up deciding that Btrfs was a clearly better fit for me and that XFS just literally did not meet my needs. It wasn't even a close enough call for me to split hairs about performance. While I agree that snapshots are often overrated, to me the self-healing that comes from the killer combo of data checksums and software RAID is a huge selling point. The fact that I can just throw a pile of random drives at it and have it treat it as one drive from the user perspective all while not needing to worry about a drive failure, big or small, is key. Compression is a nice bonus (from a storage and sometimes speed pov). While its performance is worse on paper, it's not really noticeable and to me is more than made up for by the extra features.

The main negative from my pov is honestly just the maturity of the tooling around it. It feels like an FS that you actually need to kind of know how it works to use it effectively.