There's A Proposal To Switch Fedora 33 On The Desktop To Using Btrfs

More than a decade ago Fedora was routinely trying to pursue the Btrfs file-system by default but those hopes were abandoned long ago. Heck, Red Hat Enterprise Linux no longer even supports Btrfs. While all Red Hat / Fedora interests in Btrfs seemed abandoned years ago especially with Red Hat developing their Stratis storage technology, there is a new (and serious) proposal about moving to Btrfs for Fedora 33 desktop variants.

There is a new proposal to use Btrfs as the default file-system for desktop variants starting with Fedora 33. This proposal is being backed by various Fedora developers, Facebook, and other stakeholders in believing Btrfs is more featureful than the current EXT4 while now is stable enough following years of testing.

Btrfs supports various features like solid-state drive optimizations, transparent compression support, native RAID capabilities, better handling when running out of disk space, online shrink/grow, and much more.

The proposal was sent out today to the Fedora devel mailing list. Understandably there are users and developers on both sides on whether this is a good idea. It will be interesting to see if any consensus is reached and ultimately whether the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee decides to approve this change for using Btrfs by default on Fedora desktop installs.