Comment by gjsman-1000
1 year ago
ext4 and Btrfs are only well supported on Linux; they are not universal standards.
NTFS was only supported well on Windows until recently; but extensions like NTFS Encryption (BitLocker) are still Windows only. Mac still does not let you write to an NTFS volume.
APFS and HFS+ are obviously Apple file systems.
FreeBSD does not support ext4 or Btrfs well; but instead prefers UFS2 or ZFS despite also being an open-source Unix-inspired OS.
The world runs on proprietary or non-universal file systems with CDFS (ISO 9660), FAT, and exFAT being the sole exceptions.
Is there a single filesystem in the world (besides "simple" ones like FAT) that both has an open standard AND is licensed in a "usable" codebase (MIT or other "non-copyleft" license)?
I think UDF was meant to be this, though I don't think it supports everything you'd want. Does NTFS have licensing issues though?
NTFS has serious performance issues, nobody should use it.
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zfs?
correct. but it's also a management system so perhaps they only want a files system? no idea why more don't use zfs. especially after the auto expansion update earlier in the year.
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xfs.
if GPL is a non-starter for you, youre missing the point of the open standard. apple already discloses a litany of various GPL it ships. XFS would be no different.
> NTFS was only supported well on Windows until recently
I remember using ntfs-3g without any issues on my first Linux laptop 15 years ago. So that's not really "recently".
I intentionally excluded unofficial or third party software, as almost anything is supported if you’re brave enough. The quality of said drivers also wildly varies.
Until 4 years ago, nothing was good enough for the upstream Linux kernel.
I mean, yeah, you could say that. Something being in the kernel is a good benchmark of quality. But IMO open-source is different. For instance, Terraform had no stable release from 2014 till 2021, that didn't stop enterprises from using it on scale.
if Mac also supported Linux file formats they would get closer to universal, though? we can't get to that world without these individual steps.
creating a new non universal one is backing away from it
Does this even matter, if you can copy/mount files over a network?
What are potential use cases where you'd want to support those additional file systems? External drives?
I just ran into a use case yesterday. I wanted to copy some files from either my Mac or my Windows machine onto the MicroSD card for my SteamDeck, which is ext4.
I wanted to just plug in the card and copy files, but couldn’t.
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Even FreeBSD can't be bothered to do a good job supporting Linux file systems. They're basically proprietary siloed file systems like the rest, even if code is available. Linux, meanwhile, can't be bothered to support either of FreeBSD's file systems officially. UFS2 is hardly patented anymore, but Linux doesn't care beyond read-only support.
Being open-source, and even being in a popular open-source project, does not make a standard, or even imply inferiority to those who do not implement it.
https://xkcd.com/927/
There might be some license issues, but the dirty secret is filesystem portability isn't terribly important, and for the users for whom it is - ExFAT and friends are usually good enough.
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[flagged]
A. You're flagged for graphic, inappropriate, and triggering language.
B. Oracle sued Google for a decade over whether a minor number of APIs were copyrighted in Java; do you think Apple's eager to embrace their technology regardless of license? Heck, even Ubuntu wasn't willing to make that bet.
C. Guess how much official licenses for those fancy file systems cost.
D. ZFS, and other fancy file systems, are not known for low RAM and CPU usage. In a server, this does not matter; but it's pretty important for anything on a battery.