RHEL 7 and KaOS bet on XFS as there default Filesystem in there next Release.
Maybe an nice idea for netrunner too ?
XFS is good for enterprises and big workstations with big workflow and lots of big files.
As for the default filesystem this isn’t always necessary as normal users tend to have lots of small files lying around (e.g. mp3s, jpegs and so on)
When it comes to XFS I also experienced booting problems on some old Intel Macs as they didn’t like booting from a root XFS partition. (maybe EFI or Grub related I am not quite sure)
So changing the default here is a big big step whith the high potential to break everything.
Thats one of the reasons I would consider to do this only after lots and lots of testing.
And btw. the big switch for almost every distribution is coming this or next year with btrfs which will most likely replace ext4 on many desktop distributions by default.
So XFS is one of the best tested filesystems yes ? Maybe the best ? And btrfs is still not marked as stable ?
If you compare ext4 usage it is as widely used as xfs is in business. So yes. XFS and ext4 are one of the best.
Thats a war of opinions here. Its just like asking is Ferrari better than Lamborghini.
From a technical standpoint it depends on what your file usage actually is.
Do you have large raw video data to proceed or small little txt/doc/mp3/ogg/flac files.
Do you use an ssd instead of a rotating harddrive . It all depends on the usage.
For every usage scenario there is a filesystem basically.
And then of course it depends on personal experience.
I had bad experiences with XFS before like freezing notebook. So I switched to the not declared stable btrfs and it is running fine for more than a year now.
On my smartphone I also use btrfs already (guess what smartphone comes with it preinstalled) and its also running pretty fine and stable. No issues yet. Thanks to subvolumes I am able to extend the filesystem easily when plugging in an microSD card.
It isn’t which is true but it has tons of cool new features that are also very handy for the normal user like snapshots, raid support, subvolumes and other nifty little things.
But its also true that its still missing some stability in certain points. I’ve been told about raid systems crashing badly removing or even destroying files which is bad.
We don’t force anyone to use a specific filesystem. In fact you can already install Netrunner on XFS or even Btrfs or JFS or whatever else filesystem comes to your mind (as long as it is bootable by grub). But what we need to do is to ship a sane default option. In that case the almost hidden consensus between all major desktop linux distributions is ext4 as it is fast, stable and is able to work quite well with moving harddrives and ssds.
So better stay with ext4 for now.