I’m having trouble understanding all the benefits of BTRFS and how they’ll apply to me.
Copy on Write and auto-compression seem like they will free up a bit of space.
What other practical benefits will I see from using BTRFS? Are there any noticeable performance benefits?
I use my computer to dual-boot. I don’t need snapshots because I have a custom script for a fresh install. I use my PC for gaming and work. I’ve got an NVMe, two SSD’s and one HDD.
Thanks in advance!
I’ve had a major issue with btrfs and nvme. Not sure if you have a laptop or a desktop, but it works fine on my desktop and shit on the laptop. Snapshots still didn’t save my system the other day when the system broke in the middle of a kernel upgrade. I even had snapshots in grub. I still had to reinstall to be able to access the system. I was also told that xfs is much better. Haven’t tried it yet. I personally don’t care for btrfs, and I’m using the tried and true ext4 and it’s been serving me very well. I have the root and home partitions separated in case shit goes haywire.
This is hearsay or you didn’t properly configure your snapshots, no way around that.
I found the “best of both worlds” setup is xfs for root fs and then btrfs for /home.
Is this arch?
Almost. EndeavourOS to be exact.
Yeah, I assumed something similar. Arch (may be endeavor also) is very much a la carte build your own system, so coyld be some tweaks needed. I found Leap and Tumbleweed have no issues with btrfs because its integral to the whole distro. My NVME use on desktop and laptop have been going steady for 7 years.
I’ve always wanted to try opensuse. I have, but I was confused with their package manager. I was too lazy to figure it all out. I may give it a try. Also, I hated their installed for manual partitioning. It was overly complicated for me. I’ll mess with it in a VM to learn more about how to manually partition and also mess with their package manager more.
There is a 2 page zypper cheat sheet online that is helpful for learning the commands, but they also have Yast2-GTK GUI you can launch; installing packages is just clicking the checkboxes of what you want and unchecking for what you dont want, or selecting certain package versions and click the lock icon. Then hit apply. The nice part of the GUI is you can see what files it provides and read descriptions etc all in one place. I agree, the installer is confusing because there are so many ways to configure your partitioning-either manually or with auto, or semi auto., It is a bit overwhelming at first, I was lost when first coming to linux, and reinstalled it a few times to suit as I learned what it (and myself) was doing. Now that I’m used to it it provides an amazing amount of power and flexibilty.
I think the package manager isn’t hard to figure out. I do need to study the installer very hard so I can learn its ins and outs. I need my partitions separate. Thanks for the info. I really appreciate it
Also something not glaringly obvious is when you get to the summary page of the installer you can click the software title and it brings you to the package install section, you can uncheck any or all groups/patterns or click detail and choose individual packages that suit your needs.
I actually know about this one. I thought it was the coolest shit ever. I’m seriously gonna look into it. I have always respected suse, but just never gave it a chance