Hy guys!
I’m thinking about giving openSUSE another try. I usually use Ubuntu or Debian, but I’m trying to get away from Ubuntu/Debian-based distros. This will to change has started because my laptop is having sleeping issues with the official Ubuntu 16.04 LTS kernel (I have to use a mainline kernel build instead) and there have also been a few other bugs here and there that I’ve always felt that have been neglected in the Ubuntu and Debian community.
I have sporadically tried and hopped between other distros, including openSUSE. In fact, I used openSUSE 13.2 for a few months but I ended up screwing up my install because I mixed repositories that I shouldn’t have mixed and then run a zypper dup (my bad, I know!). That said, I will probably go with Tumbleweed this time. Leap seems a wonderful distribution, and I would love to use it on a server or other areas where stability is a must, but I like to keep stuff relatively up to date and that’s why I kept using Ubuntu on my laptop (updating on every release, LTS or not). In fact, I wouldn’t consider using any distro with an update cycle longer than 6 months (so basically, I stuck with Ubuntu, Fedora or rolling releases like openSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch Linux). Still, I like to have a minimum amount of stability and openSUSE Tumbleweed seems to offer that (from what I’ve seen it seems to be slightly more conservative than Arch Linux). I use my laptop for everyday computing, programming (mainly C/C++, Java, PHP, Python, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, etc.) so I like to have the most recent stuff available on the repositories, but I also hate that stuff suddenly breaks. That’s why a 6 months update rate has always had a nice equilibrium between this two, somewhat contradicting objectives. I hope that openSUSE Tumbleweed does not sacrifice too much stability and reliability in exchange for freshness, but we shall see if that’s the case or not if I really ended up giving it a try.
Meanwhile, I’m still unsure about which filesystem should I use. This is a dualboot system where I keep a separate NTFS partition for Windows and another NTFS partition for my data. This data partition basically serves as my home on both Windows and Linux, so I usually don’t keep a separate / and /home partitions like openSUSE recommends. I just mount my data folder and put some symlinks on my home. Besides that, there is little else on my home other than “dot files” and “dot folders”. Still, on a different system (running Linux alone) I would definitely use a separate /home partition. What I find a bit odd is that the official recommendation is to use XFS, a file system that I’m not very familiar with but that it seems to offer almost nothing over a more conservative choice such as ext4. I mean, it even has such a limitation as being impossible to shrink it if needed. It may make sense on very specific use cases where it really shines, but as a general recommendation over ext4, it seems a bit pointless and may actually be detrimental. What do you think about this?
So, that leaves with /. Which file system would you recommend? Do you think that btrfs is really the way to go? I mean, I know it’s the default on openSUSE, but I haven’t seen any other distro adopting as the default. I know it has been considered stable for quite some time know, and that it offers some really nice features that would otherwise need to be managed by higher level tools (e.g., LVM). However, isn’t it a bit “overkill” to use for common desktop/laptop use? The only thing that I may actually eventually use are the snapshots. I mean, if some update screws up something, which is more likely to happen on Tumbleweed than on Leap, I can always rollback to the state just before the update. It also may prevent me from breaking my system if I choose the wrong repositories, even though this time I’ll just limit myself to the official Tumbleweed repositories + Packman for Tumbleweed. At most, I may add a Tumbleweed specific repository for some package that I really need that is unavailable at the main repos + Packman and I’ll keep my use of zypper dup to the minimum necessary :P.
Still, other than snapshots, I don’t see myself using any of btrfs’ advanced features. Is it worth to use it just for that? Does it really have the overall level of reliability and performance that an older file system such as ext4 has? I just wary about this change because my current / is in ext4 and this has been the file system that I’ve been using on Linux like forever (I mean, I’ve used ext3 and probably ext2 before). Should I just jump to btrfs and embrace it?
Thanks in advance for any tips you may give me.
