turdas
Tolppa: hillottu.
I have 64 GB of memory in my desktop with 16 GB of zswap. Can’t say I’ve noticed any difference because I haven’t actually been in a situation that uses all this memory yet (aside from some programs leaking memory), but the thought of getting “free” RAM is appealing to me.
They keep making this more and more difficult. Used to be you could just choose between yes and no. Then they made it so you can only choose between yes and no if you don’t have an ethernet cable connected. Now you have to use a hidden key combination and type in a secret command.
Soon you’ll only be able to install without an internet connection by downloading a special ISO with a hidden download link. Soon after that they’ll restrict said ISO to some insider program.
The two things I would recommend to any btrfs user is enabling zstd compression and setting up automatic snapshots using snapper or Timeshift. I would personally recommend snapper if you’re comfortable with command-line tools, as Timeshift only supports a very specific configuration.
zstd compression is very fast, so if you have a reasonably new CPU you will notice no overhead from it, making it effectively just free extra disk space.
Snapshots require a little bit of reading to understand, particularly because you will want a very specific subvolume layout to sensibly organize them, and distro installation wizards rarely give you such a layout except on distros that support snapshots out of the box, like OpenSUSE.
The Arch wiki page on btrfs is amazingly good, as is their page on snapper if you want to set up snapshots.
Btrfs can be a little complex and needs more user-friendly tooling for some of the advanced features to be useful to “laymen”, but OP seems technical enough (the fact that he cares about what filesystem he’s running in the first place is an indicator of this) that this should not be an issue.
As for “weird problems”, the majority of those seems to come down to users using advanced features without RTFM, and users having underlying system issues that cause issues that btrfs catches early and refuses to mount the filesystem as RW, and the users then blame btrfs for the issue.
Almost all data, aside from stuff like databases, benefits from filesystem-level compression, and almost every user benefits from having snapshots. Snapshots have saved my ass so many times, e.g. when I accidentally delete a file I shouldn’t have, or when a program has overwritten a file it shouldn’t have, or when Crusader Kings 3 corrupts my savegame.
As for bitrot, I frankly don’t know if btrfs has an automatic mechanism of fixing rotten files from an external backup of the filesystem (created using btrfs send), but even if it doesn’t it’ll tell you what has rotted so you can restore the files manually.
Mikäs tämän rajuilman iltapaskanimi sitten on, Ukkosgeddon?