Hello,
I decided to register just so I could offer my humble take on this. First of all, I have many years of Linux experience (mostly on Debian and Gentoo), but after years without having Linux on my desktop environments (though I did use it on all servers I have managed, mostly on the Debian side of things). Seeing the currently offered options, even though I almost nil experience with RHEL/CentOS/Fedora systems, I decided to go with Fedora earlier this year (just before F32 was released). BTRFS drove me an inch away from completely removing Fedora from my system and never looking back again. I mean, it couldn't be just a file system, it seemed impossible that deeper issues within the distro weren't involved.
Android emulator went literally unusable. Images that podman would build 10x times faster in lower specced servers. Turned off datacow on the folders containing the vm images/container fs's and copied them in order to get rid of the fragmentation. Things were a little better, but performance was still degrading every single day. I just threw the towel and turned off datacow entirely as a palliative, which made the system somewhat usable but also made btrfs a toothless tiger, took away all of its compelling features.
All of this was on a Predator Helios 300 - 572 notebook, i7 7700, 32gb ram, dedicated Nvidia 1060, with the BTRFS system installed on a 500GB WD Blue SSD. At this point I was starting to wonder whether Fedora, Gnome or even Linux were a viable choice of this machine, it seemed my computer wasn't getting along with the system at all.
Only reason I still have Fedora is that I managed to backup the data on my NVME WD Black 256GB drive, wiped it and created a new XFS partition as a last ditch effort (also mirroring the previous Swap / boot layout, but this time I had swap encryption) I mean, of course the PCI-E interface is fast than the SATA one, but the difference is barely noticeable during daily usage. And while I had BTRFS as a raw partition, XFS was on top of LVM and LUKS. My WD Blue SSD is also, fine tested it over and over again to make sure and my previous Windows installation ran there and performed just fine.
Wasn't very hopeful, but after a simple rsync and simply pointing grub to the new XFS partition gave a whole new life to my system. The sizes were very similar (the BTRFS partition had about 230GB), so it can't come down to that. The difference was so absurd I couldn't believe I was actually enjoying the exact same system just because of a FS change. I really wish I could provide benchmarks to back my claim but at this point I was quite fed up and had lost a lot of productive time because of the countless hang-ups and even crashes I experienced with btrfs.
Don't expect much love on this, since my opinion has been downvoted on reddit by many of those who don't want to hear bad news about btrfs. And no, I don't have any benchmarks and did not collect any logs, I'm not talking about a bug, BTRFS is defective beyond anything Fedora could do to fix it. After spending so much time fighting against my system
So, deciding to come back to Linux after getting fed up with Windows, meant that I'd have to make some choices. Foremost of all for me, after choosing Fedora, was choosing a suitable filesystem. I installed it on a partition taking about half of a pretty decent WD Blue SSD. I actually expected btrfs to be one of the best aspects of my experience, was quite excited to make use of its capabilities (and I didn't even get to using RAID features, which are knowingly riddled with defects).
I've never thought much of ext4 and in the past I just went with JFS for my desktop machines. I mean, my machine is pretty decent, the performance impact couldn't be that bad, even seeing the benchmarks. Turns out I was wrong. My system was pretty much unusable after some weeks. Even defragmenting and doing every kind of mount flag option optimization known to man didn't make the situation any better. Turning off CoW was the only thing that made me able to even perform simple tasks on my otherwise performant computer.
I'm not surprised RHEL completely got rid of BTRFS and not even oracle is using it as a default for their Enterprise Linux.
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