Btrfs installation Zorin 16 beta

Hi,

I am curious about Btrfs installation of Zorin os beta16.

Atm I have normal ext4 but want to do one with btrfs.

Any guide how to do this?

Is it enough to just put root ( /) and ( home) partition in btrfs and finish?

What about swap partition? I saw in one article that swap to file is not useful or safe with btrfs. So probably swap partition is best option?

Does Zorin have some automatic tools for maintaining btrfs or need manually?

Thanks

Follow this useful guide here. Hope this helps.

1 Like

Thanks.

That is a basic yes.But what after installation? Any other setup

And most important, does Zorin os supports btrfs? You can find btrfs as a options in every distro but only few of them support btrfs out of the box.
i dont know where to find out those information :smirk:

@anon37206250

Interesting , I just found out that stock kernel doesnt support btrfs :slight_smile:

arko@marko-HP-ENVY-x360-Convertible-13-ar0xxx:~$ cat /proc/filesystems
nodev	sysfs
nodev	tmpfs
nodev	bdev
nodev	proc
nodev	cgroup
nodev	cgroup2
nodev	cpuset
nodev	devtmpfs
nodev	configfs
nodev	debugfs
nodev	tracefs
nodev	securityfs
nodev	sockfs
nodev	bpf
nodev	pipefs
nodev	ramfs
nodev	hugetlbfs
nodev	devpts
	ext3
	ext2
	ext4
	squashfs
	vfat
nodev	ecryptfs
	fuseblk
nodev	fuse
nodev	fusectl
nodev	efivarfs
nodev	mqueue
nodev	pstore
nodev	autofs

The b-tree file system can be installed and used on Zorin 16 (currently, BETA).
You can find the modules necessary in the 5.8.0-50 kernel with

ls /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/fs/*/*ko

You can use lsmod command to find and sudo modprobe to add or remove modules.

All that being said... It is recommended to not try to install brtfs on Zorin OS (Or Ubuntu, for that matter...)
1.) It's simply overkill for a regular personal use computer.
2.) Like the SR-71 Blackbird: The Blackbird flies like an angel at RamJet speed. But slower than that, it is leaky, shaky and difficult to maintain control. In this, brtfs is like that on a standard home computer. It runs beautifully under a heavy load with massive data storage. But under a light load with smaller storage, it is outperformed in benchmarks by ext4.

If you plan on exploring just for the sake of doing so- please make sure you make good backups of your files prior to proceeding. Honestly, it is a lot of tedious configuring for really, no real reward on a standard system.
Now... if you are setting up a server for high traffic- that is another matter.

2 Likes

It sounds like a real mess when you posted this ,hehe.

I am looking for it just for my personal laptop.
Because I previously used Fedora, and it had btrfs by default.
Much easier for snapshot backup etc. Also I am previous Manjaro user.

And I saw it is also better for SSD hard drive.

Maybe I am wrong, and just need to learn to use Zorin OS :slight_smile: get best of it xD

You are right; these are valid points in favor of brtfs. But as with many things, it is a tradeoff.
My opinion is; it is not worth the cons in comparison to the pros, given the setup and installation and the poorer over-all performance. Unless you are performing backups quite often... Personally, I prefer a different way of doing back ups and I use no apps or third party methods for it.
It can be initially very slow; but once done is fast, easy and easy to keep up to date.

On SSD; It's not journaling and it supports trim; which is good for SSD. But, ext4 supports Trim and is almost as good. The question of: Is it worth it for the individual personal notebook owner? becomes pretty relevant on that.
An advantage of brtfs is that you can use btrfs zstd compression to save some space on your SSD. But again, unless youa re doing Massive Files- it just isn't worth it. I have a terabyte and a half of drive space and have a lot of files and I have not even filled 4.5% of just the terabyte drive, yet.
Unless you are collecting full length feature films by the handful... It just won't really make a helpful difference, even if technically, it can save some space.

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I agree with you.. Will do clean flash with ext4. Or maybe wait stable 16 xd

About backups, just want to be sure that I have everything safe. I have a lot of pictures, backup of games so dont want to lose those xD

See this. Worked for me.