[hyperman1]

I feel a bit lost here. In the good old days, I ran ext2/ext3/ext4 and forgot about it, or Reiserfs if I felt fancy (and which was great until it wasn't).

Now, there is a cambrian explosion going on. Ext4, xfs, btrfs,bcachefs, zfs. They each have their pros and cons, and it takes a while before you find out you run into an expensive limit. E.g. Ext3/4 is good, until it ran out of inodes. ZFS is good, but has only 1 password for full disk encryption and I want to store a second one with IT. According to the jungle drums, btrfs eats your data once in a while. Bcachefs stupidly tries to get itself rejected from Linux, not good for long term stability. I'm on XFS now, but let's see how that ends.

[rcxdude]

That doesn't really match my recollection of timeline. I remember xfs being mentioned in the same sources contemporary with reiserfs (it predates ext3, even!). ZFS is about a decade newer, but not by much, and was probably the main reason most people would pay any real attention to their filesystem at that point, since it meaningfully added features not available in anything else at that point. BTRFS was basically a 'let's build the same thing, but in linux', but seems to have kinda stalled in terms of reliability (or at least in terms of reputation), and bcachefs is very much the new kid on the block, but seems to have a little bit more of a focus on getting to the reliability of ZFS, but it certainly is still not something to trust even as much as BTRFS. So it doesn't really feel like a cambrian explosion, more a new filesystem every ~5 years or so at a reasonably steady pace.

(pretty much the 3 filesystems I think about ATM are ext4 as a standard boot drive, zfs for large, long-lived data storage, and FAT/exFAT for interoperability with windows. It'd have to be a pretty niche use-case for me to consider another option. BcacheFS sounds really interesting but only to experiment with right now)

[mdedetrich]

FDE with ZFS is kind of fighting the way things are meant to be done with ZFS. ZFS allows encryption on a per dataset/zvol basis which is the officially recommended way to do encryption (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/a-quick-start-guide-...)

[swinglock]

And XFS will at unexpected shutdowns sometimes leave you with files that previously contained data now being 0 bytes.

I only really trust ZFS on Linux, but it's such a bother it can't be upstreamed and isn't fully integrated with the native Linux caching, as the native file systems are. Ext is fine too but it's missing features like checksumming and compression, and has limitations as you mentioned.