I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.
I found this wikipedia’s comparison but I want your hands-on views.
For now my mental list is
- NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
- Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
- Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
- xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
- FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
- exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
Sure.
Bazzite defaults to btrfs and yeah this distro with rolling back changes is on another level.
Well you probably used it if you had any brand new USB as it’s the default. I’m trying to flash my USBs for now with exFAT or NTFS…
NTFS is like Windows - the necessity when nothing else will work.
Wait what. exFAT can make you not to worry about eject/umount?
I mainly started using exFAT on flash drives (even on new ones) since it is interoperable between Windows, Linux, and Intel Mac. To be clear, I never don’t unmount the drive properly under normal conditions, but I remember reading around the time it was introduced that the Windows implementation guaranteed the buffers were flushed after every write (meaning no unwritten data remains when the activity indicator on the drive stops blinking) but now I can’t find any evidence that was ever the case. Wouldn’t be the first time I got bad info from the Internet. 🤷♂️