You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.
I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.
I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?
Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.
That’s an odd way to put it. NTFS is proprietary, yes, but it’s also fundamentally a stable technology which remains eternally forwards/backwards compatible with systems which have long since been frozen in time (modern NTFS is 100% identical to the NTFS used with Windows XP 20+ years ago). In this sense it’s a lot like FAT32, which you may or may not be surprised to hear was very strongly patented and never officially opened up.
When you get down to it, the key issue is that NTFS is built for the NT kernel. The various NT-isms of the filesystem do not cleanly map onto *nix metaphors. Access controls are a great example: NTFS is perfectly capable of representing *nix-ish permissions, but NT isn’t quite sure what to do with those *nix-ish permissions when interpreting them as NT-ish access controls and vice-versa.
To sum it up: problems commonly attributed to NTFS often actually tend to be issues of NT/*nix compatibility. non-NT NTFS drivers make valiant efforts to bridge the gap, but at the end of the day there will always be compromises. These compromises turn into gremlins as soon as you start sharing the same NTFS volume between NT & non-NT systems.