Your documentation on file system choice is either anecdotal or engineering-masters-thesis, seemingly no in-between

God, I feel this so much. All the benchmarks are such ass too.

I have also struggled with picking a disk layout + FS, and landed on using a single BTRFS partition with FDE.

For now, I’m happy. Unless there’s a new FS that definitively beats BTRFS on NVMe perf and supports copy-on-write and something that makes FDE as easy as subvolumes that definitively beats BTRFS on NVMe drives, I won’t even bother looking into it again.

I’ve considered moving to a RAID setup, but it seems like more trouble than it’s worth, since I do regular /home backups & NixOS keeps my entire system config in version control.

If I ever consider a different disk setup, I’m just going to fire up a clean distro install on a spare NVMe and benchmark my most common tasks myself.

NixOS has killed my decision paralysis for choosing distros and desktop env stuff since I can just enable whatever in my config, try it out, then revert if I don’t like it enough to switch.

Only thing I can’t trivially test is disk layouts, but with disko, it might be easy enough to create a custom NixOS installer that:

• auto-installs a disk layout & your config
• reboots
• runs your benchmarks
• writes the results to disk
• reboots into the live image, repeating this for a list of disk layouts.