ext4 being old, and still being the main file system most distros use by default, should be enough alone to tell you being old isnt bad.

it means its battle tested, robust, stable, and safe. Otherwise it wouldnt be old and still be in widespread use.

btrfs is great for system stability because of snapshots. You can set it up to automatically make snapshots at a timed interval or every time you run pacman.

If something breaks, you can just revert to a previous snapshot. You can even do this from grub. It’s a bit hard to set up, so if you want, you could use an arch based distro which automatically sets it up like GarudaOS.

I use btrfs because I like it’s features and I would love to see native encryption on it. I would use zfs if it’s license was GPL.

Ext4 is all I use, except for boot partitions that require different filesystems.

Been using BTRFS for all disks and purposes for a few years, I would recommend it with the requirement that you research it first. There are things you should know, like how/when to disable CoW, how to manage snapshots, how to measure filesystem use, and what the risks/purposes of the various btrfs operations are. If you know enough to avoid doing something bad with it, it’s very unlikely to break on you.

Most people should use ext4. Only use something else if you want to tinker and don’t need long term data storage.

ext4 is perfectly fine for my needs. It’s stable and just works.

Ext4 is probably going to be the fastest. When it comes to reliability, old is good. If you don’t need any of the features Btrfs and ZFS, you’ll reap higher performance using Ext4. Otherwise ZFS is more feature-complete compared to Btrfs, however it’s generally not available as root fs option in OS installers. Ubuntu used to have it as an experimental option but I think that’s gone now. If you know what you’re doing you can use it as a root fs. Personally I’m using Ext4 on LVMRAID on a 2-way NVMe mirror. I might be switching to ZFS on root when I get to rebuild this machine. All my storage is using ZFS.

I’m using btrfs for my desktop and laptop (and its snapshots have saved me a couple of times), and ZFS for my NAS and router. Both seem pretty robust.

ext4 is good enough.

I usually just use EXT4, but perhaps you should check out F2FS. It’s designed for solid state storage mediums, as while most were created with traditional spinning hard discs in mind

O use ext4 at home and in servers that are not SLES HANA DB ones.

On SLES HANA servers I use ext4 for everything but the database partitions, for which SAP and SUSE support and recommend XFS.

In a few occasions people left the non-db partitions as the default on SUSE install, btrfs, with default settings. That turned out to cause unnecessary disk and processor usage.

I would be ashamed of justifying btrfs on a server for the possibility of undoing “broken things”. Maybe in a distro hopping, system tinkering, unstable release home computer, but not in a server. You don’t play around in a server to “break things” that often. Linux (differently from Windows) servers don’t break themselves at the software level. For hardware breakages, there’s RAID, backups, and HA reduntant systems, because if it’s a hardware issue btrfs isn’t going to save you - even if you get back that corrupted file, you won’t keep running in that hardware, nor trust that “this” was the only and last file it corrupted.

EDIT: somewhat offtopic: I never use LVM. Call me paranoid and old fashioned, but I really prefer knowing where my data is, whole.

I still swear by F2FS, been super reliable and very good perf

I like btrfs cause of transparent compression but I’m pretty sure other filesystems like ZFS have that too

ext4.

Never used arch; just slackware and then enterprise linux.