Hello Gary. Am Sonntag, 11. September 2016, 12:42:03 CEST schrieb Gary Dale: > I just read an article in Linux Pro magazine (entitled "New Butter") > about Btrfs. It ended rather enigmatically with a warning that "Btrfs > does not integrate well with graphical file managers." > > This confuses me. I'd think that a file manager should operate pretty > much independently of the file system and vice versa providing that the > file system implements the basic Unix-type services (ownership, > permissions, hierarchical directory structure, etc.). Can anyone > elaborate on what the author may have been alluding to? > > I am running Debian/Stretch with the KDE/Plasma5 desktop and use Dolphin > quite a bit. Btrfs is supposedly stable and offers features that could > be quite useful to me. I've been considering switching from Ext4 for a > while but don't have any compelling reasons to do so if the switch could > cause problems with my normal workflow - such as not being able to use > Dolphin.
The author most likely means that it doesn´t support restoring files from snapshots and stuff like that. I.e. that it doesn´t support additional BTRFS features. Rest assured that Dolphin works perfectly well on a BTRFS filesystem. This ThinkPad T520 is using BTRFS since I got it, about kernel 2.6.38/39 at that time, and BTRFS DUAL SSD RAID 1 since about April 2014, kernel 3.14. In case for BTRFS you may want to inform yourself about possible pitfalls and not yet stable features tough. This is currently a discussion on BTRFS mailinglist with hopefully some people working on improving the kernel wiki¹. I also recommend to read Debian wiki page about it, since it contains many hints about possible pitfalls². Although I didn´t have any issues with compress=lzo that I am aware of, there may be some. And well avoid RAID 5 and 6 for now, I´d say. And if you use Debian Jessie, then also use backport kernels. [1] https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page [2] https://wiki.debian.org/Btrfs Thanks, -- Martin
