The news of the time interval for me is that there is a Fedora change proposal to make btrfs the default file system for Fedora desktop (via, itself via; see also the mailing list post). Given that in the past I've been a btrfs sceptic (eg, from 2015), long time readers might expect me to have some views here. However, this time around my views are cautiously optimistic for btrfs (and Fedora), although I will only be watching from a safe distance.

The first two things to note are that 2015 is a long time ago (in computer time) and I'm too out of touch with btrfs to have an informed opinion on its current state. I'm confident that people in Fedora wouldn't have proposed this change if there weren't good reasons to believe that btrfs is up to the task. The current btrfs status looks pretty good on a skim, although the section on device replacement makes me a little alarmed. The Fedora proposal also covers who else is using btrfs and has been for some time, and it's a solid list that suggest btrfs is not going to explode for Fedora users.

I'm a big proponent of modern filesystems with data and metadata checksums, so I like that aspect of btrfs. As far as performance goes, most people on desktops are unlikely to notice the difference, and as a long term user of ZFS on Linux I can testify how nice it is to not have to preallocate space to specific filesystems (even if with LVM you can grow them later).

However, I do feel that this is Fedora being a bit adventurous. This is in line with Fedora's goals and general stance of being a relatively fearless leading edge distribution, but at the same time sometimes the leading edge is also the bleeding edge. I would not personally install a new Fedora machine with btrfs in the first few releases of Fedora that defaulted to it, because I expect that there will be teething problems. Some of these may be in btrfs, but others will be in system management programs and practices that don't cope with btrfs or conflict with it.

In the long run I think that this change to btrfs will be good for Fedora and for Linux as a whole. Ext4 is a perfectly decent filesystem (and software RAID works fine), but it's possible to do much better, as ZFS has demonstrated for a long time.