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Well, for those of us that have been waiting on btrfs for a frigging decade I get the feeling that it is never going to be ready.

If I wait another decade, will btrfs have matured? Will there be ANY half-modern filesystem for linux? I'm not convinced.

Currently bcachefs seems more appealing but well, long way to go there as well.



I have been happily using BtrFS for the more interesting stuff inside my home directory without issue for a good couple years now. I'm not using any of the more interesting features (multiple disks, etc) beyond snapshots and compression, but, so far, it's good enough for daily work.


What problems have you had with Btrfs recently?


That, exact, question is the question you get, and has got for years and years, when questioning btrfs maturity. It seems as if btrfs always "just yesterday" got mature just when that last thing was fixed.

Sorry, but I don't believe enough in btrfs to try it out for real (and don't have time to play with it just for fun). Especially when playing with more advanced features, the status page does not inspire confidence.

The paragraph on btrfs in https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs seems spot on and exactly the feeling you get after spending a decade of hope on btrfs. And that kind of review is exactly what you don't want on the brand new finally-we-can-store-data-properly-on-linux solution.


I found the patron site annoyingly hard to read on this device, so here's that paragraph, in case anyone is wondering:

btrfs, which was supposed to be Linux's next generation COW filesystem - Linux's answer to zfs. Unfortunately, too much code was written too quickly without focusing on getting the core design correct first, and now it has too many design mistakes baked into the on disk format and an enormous, messy codebase - bigger that xfs. It's taken far too long to stabilize as well - poisoning the well for future filesystems because too many people were burned on btrfs, repeatedly (e.g. Fedora's tried to switch to btrfs multiple times and had to switch at the last minute, and server vendors who years ago hoped to one day roll out btrfs are now quietly migrating to xfs instead).




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