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When I installed OpenSuse on a test machine, it found the existing Linux partitions, and it even figured out whhich should be root and which should be /home. It kept /home unchanged, re-formatted / but kept it as ext4, and it found the Windows 7 partitions and worked out which was which, and suggested a mount point /windows/C for the correct C: drive partition.
The defaults were absolutely spot on for me, I didn't have to touch a thing when the installation came to disk partitioning and formatting.
Oh it's not that spot on. I have 4 HDDs on my system. A few of them are home to Linux distros. The installer has a mind of it own and won't let me create my own partitioning scheme even if I tell it I want to.
If I go into manual partitioning mode and choose to edit a mount point like /boot it says it's already taken cause, well cause it used it when it suggested the partitioning scheme.
It also insists to install GRUB on /dev/sda even it I want it on /dev/sdc and I'm perfectly fine with choosing to boot from that disk when starting my system and pressing F8 but SuSE won't let me. WTF?!
I've gone from ext2, to ext3 to ext4, Seems pretty sane to me.
Ext2 was released the same year as NTFS and there have been 5 versions of that since it was released.
BTRFS can't even fsck yet so i wouldn't worry about it defaulting on distros yet.
What major distribution has selected anything else than ext4 as their default currently ?
I think Oracle announced they would make btrfs their new default (soon). But to call Oracle's Linux a major distribution is probably stretching the thruth.
Here is what Google choose for their filesystem to store all their data (they also employ the creator and some other developers of ext4):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp5Ehw7ByuU
hint: it was ext4 without journaling
Part of the point I was trying to make is that Linux is a kernel that is used in Desktops and Servers along with a mostly standardised Gnu tool chain, but also in many different embedded scenarios.
There obviously can't be an official default for all of linux, as there isn't a single body that can speak for all of linux. So the only way something ends up being a defacto default is by its own merits. And BTRFS has not yet merited defacto default status, and I question if it ever will.
But for the pedantic among us, here is a review of the default File systems found on Linux Distros:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions#Tech...
Member since:
2006-07-14
No. There really isn't one. I think you meant " one most chose by desktop/server GNU/Linux distros to be the default". We've gone from EXT2 to Reiser 3 to Ext3 to XFS to Ext4, as the sweet spot moves for different situations. BTRFS looks good, but the benchmarks have yet to catch up to ext4 for most tests. Sure it has some compelling features which will make it nice for some applications, but a "default" would have to be best for most situations. Which BTRFS is defiantly not right now and to reach that might require some compromise for other io workloads. You just never really know where one is headed performance wise, until it reaches production level readiness and people start relying on certain performance quirks.