On 9/24/2025 11:16 PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 9/24/25 6:02 PM, home user via users wrote:
In an earlier thread ("questions: file systems (was:
/var/lib/flatpak/ repo/objects...)"), Will referred me to the Redhat
website
"https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/
html-single/managing_file_systems/index#types-of-file-systems_overview-
of-available-file-systems".
I've read that a few times. I've also examined wikipedia's
"Comparison of File Systems":
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems";.
It seems the main file systems to consider are BTRFS, ext4, and XFS.
Based on the wikipedia article, I made a table showing how those
three choices differ. Based on that comparison, the Redhat article,
and other discussion on this list (including in this thread), I
notice a few of you seem to be real fans of BTRFS, and a few of you
seem to be quite critical of BTRFS. I'm currently weakly leaning
towards BTRFS for the new desktop (for those things where I have a
choice). I do recognize the choice of file system is a matter of
"use case" (broadly speaking) and, more likely than not, personal
preference.
Questions:
If I use BTRFS for /home (that's the default, right?), can I easily
turn off
* copy-on-write,
* compression,
* encryption, and
* (maybe) data deduplication
for /home, but still easily use those capabilities on a few scattered
files and sub-directories within /home?
Why would you want to turn those options off?
I easily imagine of the value of those capabilities for
business/commercial/government/financial/etc environments. I can
readily see them as critical and/or essential in such environments. But
this is a home-use-only desktop. Using those capabilities can be
beneficial, but come with costs of (a little) extra time and extra
complexity, and with extra complexity comes additional risk. For me and
my "use case", the added time, complexity, and risk outweigh the
potential benefits. When I copy, I within minutes edit the duplicate,
or take the duplicate off-desktop. So copy-on-write is of no use to
me. In personal space (in /home), I will have plenty of space;
compression does not benefit me. It HAS caused me occasional problems.
I am the desktop's sole user, so with proper firewall settings, the
encryption offers me nothing. There are private aspects to these that I
will not put into this public forum.
I want them off!
Encryption is normally done at the partition level. btrfs doesn't
have encryption itself. You would create a LUKS volume on the
partition and then create the btrfs filesystem on top of that. I've
never personally used encryption.
So I do not need to be concerned with encryption, right?
The other three: are those things I deal with during installation or
after? I'll be able to disable them if I stick with BTRFS for /home,
right?
Am I correct in thinking that all top level directories other than
/home must use specific file systems and I should not concern myself
with those, but use the defaults?
/boot is a separate partition by default, but could be included in /
All the other top level directories (other than /home) are either part
of / or are special filesystems in RAM. e.g. procfs, sysfs, tmpfs, etc.
Unless you're expecting space issues, you normally don't do anything
special with them.
Thank-you, Samuel.
--
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