i’ve instaled opensuse tumbleweed a bunch of times in the last few years, but i always used ext4 instead of btrfs because of previous bad experiences with it nearly a decade ago. every time, with no exceptions, the partition would crap itself into an irrecoverable state
this time around i figured that, since so many years had passed since i last tried btrfs, the filesystem would be in a more reliable state, so i decided to try it again on a new opensuse installation. already, right after installation, os-prober failed to setup opensuse’s entry in grub, but maybe that’s on me, since my main system is debian (turns out the problem was due to btrfs snapshots)
anyway, after a little more than a week, the partition turned read-only in the middle of a large compilation and then, after i rebooted, the partition died and was irrecoverable. could be due to some bad block or read failure from the hdd (it is supposedly brand new, but i guess it could be busted), but shit like this never happens to me on extfs, even if the hdd is literally dying. also, i have an ext4 and an ufs partition in the same hdd without any issues.
even if we suppose this is the hardware’s fault and not btrfs’s, should a file system be a little bit more resilient than that? at this rate, i feel like a cosmic ray could set off a btrfs corruption. i hear people claim all the time how mature btrfs is and that it no longer makes sense to create new ext4 partitions, but either i’m extremely unlucky with btrfs or the system is in fucking perpetual beta state and it will never change because it is just good enough for companies who can just, in the case of a partition failure, can just quickly switch the old hdd for a new one and copy the nightly backup over to it
in any case, i am never going to touch btrfs ever again and i’m always going to advise people to choose ext4 instead of btrfs
as i said, maybe that’s the ideal for industrial/business applications (e.g. servers, remote storage) where the cost of replacing disks due to failure is already accounted for and the company has a process ready and pristine data integrity is of utmost importance, but for home use, reliability of the hardware you do have right now is more important than perfect data integrity, because i want to be as confident as possible that my system is going to boot up next time i turn it on. in my experience, i’ve never had any major data loss in ext4 due to hardware malfunction. also, most files on a filesystem are replaceable anyway (especially the system files), so it makes even less sense to install your system on a btrfs drive from that perspective.
what you’re saying me is basically “btrfs should never be advised for home use”
I mean, as someone who hasn’t encountered these same issues as you, I found btrfs really useful for home use. The snapshotting functionality is what gives me a safe feeling that I’ll be able to boot my system. On ext4, any OS update could break your system and you’d have to resort to backups or a reinstall to fix it.
But yeah, it’s quite possible that my hard drives were never old/bad enough that I ran into major issues…
honestly, i do get the appeal of btrfs, which is why i wanted to try it out one more time. but i feel i can’t trust it if it is really that fault intolerant. ext4 might not have as many features as btrfs, but it is more lenient and more predictable
(also, recovering from update failures should be the job of the package system imo)
I think it cannot be expected from the package manager, because it cannot revert database and config structure updates that were automatically done by the programs themselves. if you just restore the old versions of packages, some of them will refuse to start up, crash, or lose data
what distro are you using that updates breaking the system are an expected (and not an exceptional) scenario?
opensuse, but I have regularly had such experience with ubuntu too