I think the problem with btrfs is that it entered the spotlight way to early. With Wayland there was time to work on a lot of the kinks before everyone started seriously switching.
On btrfs a bunch of people switched blindly and then lost data. This caused many to have a bad impression of btrfs. These days it is significantly better but because there was so much fear there is less attention paid to it and it is less widely used.
I wanted to stick to (what I’d refer to as) OG distros; so independent distros that have kept their relevance over a long period of time.
But you’re correct, Garuda Linux and others default to Btrfs as well. At this point, I’d argue it’s the most sensible option if snapshot functionality is desired from Snapper/Timeshift.
@lancalot none of the “main” distros default to BTRFS, just “derivatives” default to BTRFS, Garuda is based on Arch, so it’s normal that it’s one of the rising new distros, Garuda rose because gaming on Linux received a huge boost from sources like Valve so I doubt that it (Garuda) will deviate from its path with time, plus, they provide multiple flavors for multiple purposes, gaming requires stability & sometimes a rollback mechanism, that’s where BTRFS shine, not so much stability BTW
So you don’t regard Fedora (or openSUSE) as “main” distro?
@lancalot OpenSUSE is based on SUSE (created in 1994)
Fedora was developed as a continuation of RHEL
Maybe “main” is not well appropriate, I wanted to say “distros that have no precedence & not based on anything”, for example, 0.12 was a “main” distro, MCC Interim Linux was a “derivative” distro
I suppose we differ in our definitions. Which is absolutely fine, to be honest*.
For completeness’ sake, IMO it’s basically the intersection of Major Distributions and Independent Distributions. Which happens to consist of Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE and Slackware.
Out of these, Arch and Gentoo don’t have defaults, but their documentation uses ext4 most frequently for examples. For the remaining four, Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs. While Debian and Slackware default to ext4.
In all fairness, one might argue that Distrowatch’s list of major distros is arbitrary. Therefore, we could refine what’s found above by including actually data. For this, I’ll use Boiling Steam’s usage chart based on ProtonDB’s data. This ain’t perfect either, but it’s the best I can do. Here, we notice how both Gentoo and Slackware are not represented. Furthermore, NixOS poses as a candidate instead. For which, we find that (if anything) ext4 is the default. Regardless, it doesn’t actually impact the earlier outcome:
Anyhow, what are the main distros according to you? Please offer an exhaustive list, please. Thanks in advance!
@lancalot the “main” that are alive today are (like on this graph) https://rreinold.github.io/explore-linux/ :Debian, Slackware, RHEL, Gentoo, Arch & android
These are only the alive ones, however, I couldn’t find any info about Nix OS so it remains on the maybe category cause I tried it and could not find any hint to the past
I suppose that’s a fair assessment. Thanks for the clarification!
However, I do give precedence over their current situations.
Regarding NixOS, it and other independent distros are absent in the link you provided. NixOS is literally its own thing and also old; older than Ubuntu and Android for example. So, if anything, it did deserve a mention. Though, I suppose the maker of that website didn’t think it was relevant enough to be included over three years ago. NixOS’ popularity has thankfully exploded in the mean time, though.
@lancalot I understand the list I provided is not necessarily complete, because Void & Solus are also independent, however, for them to be “main”, they should have “derivatives”, I don’t claim that I have a big Linux experience, but I tried & documented myself about the distros on the list, & can confirm that they are “main”, I also tried Nix OS, the use of 1 config file is refreshing, however that ease comes at the cost of some flexibility, installing Steam there is too complicated for me
Got you. Aight. I suppose that does disqualify NixOS. Though, to be fair, Guix System is heavily inspired from NixOS.
Hehe 😜. Yeah, the paradigm shift associated with NixOS isn’t one that’s overcome in one sitting. But it’s cool to hear that you’ve tested it for yourself.
Anyhow, this was a cool interaction. Thank you for offering your insights! Wish you, my akhi in (at least) humanity, a lovely day!