[pnutjam]

I feel like you really need to have a reason to use ext3/4. I stick to xfs for daily stuff and btrfs if I want any sort of extra functionality. It's super stable in basic configs.

For example, I have a /data drive formated xfs, then I mount a /backup formated btrfs, rsync the 2, take a btrfs snapshot, and unmount /backup.

[tomjakubowski]

what makes xfs better than ext4 as a general purpose filesystem?

[ak217]

xfs dynamically allocates inode storage space. A very typical failure scenario of ext4 is to run out of inode quota while there are plenty of free blocks available. This scenario is not possible with xfs. This alone makes it more dependable than ext4 in practice.

There used to be major performance variances where xfs was better in certain workloads and ext4 in others, but those appear to have been smoothed out and now their performance seems very similar across all workloads.

[kiririn]

Lack of support for shrinking in XFS is one reason that regularly comes up for me

[op00to]

What use case regularly shrinks file systems? Not doubting, curious!

[dotancohen]

  > For example, I have a /data drive formated xfs, then I mount a /backup formated btrfs, rsync the 2, take a btrfs snapshot, and unmount /backup.

I also unmount the backup drive(s) when not in use, but I'm just cp'ing the important directories from one ext4 filesystem to another. I'd consider btrfs or xfs for general use, I'd love to know why you choose xfs for everyday use. Sure, it's better than ext4, but why not btrfs all around?

[pnutjam]

Mostly legacy. I should convert it.

[nyanpasu64]

I once formatted an external drive with xfs, wanted to repurpose some of the space to be readable on Windows, found out you couldn't resize xfs, reformatted the drive as exfat (lol you can't resize that either), and lost my last copy of some past files.