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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different? (lm.paradisus.day)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Cool, good to know. I'd be interested to learn how they mitigate fragmentation, though. It's not clear to me how COW could mitigate the copy cost without fragmentation, but I'm certain people smarter than me have been thinking about the problem for my whole life. I know spinning disks have their own set of limitations, but even SSDs perform better on sequential reads over random reads, so it seems like the preference would still be to not split a file up too much.