Guest post by The openSUSE project released openSUSE 13.2 on Tuesday. The latest version of the big, green distro ships with updated desktop software, including KDE 4.14 and GNOME 3.14. The new release also features new artwork, a streamlined installer and faster YaST modules. Perhaps most importantly, openSUSE ships with the advanced Btrfs file system by default and will automatically take snapshots of the operating system whenever configuration changes are made. This allows administrators to roll back disruptive changes quickly and without using backups.
Further details of the new openSUSE release can be found in the project’s release announcement and in the release notes.
Its “Btrfs” file system. “fs” is integral part of name.
And its d*** good file system too
I went ahead and made the change, even though IMO saying “Btrfs file system” is a little like saying “ATM Machine.”
How’s that different from the “NTFS file system”?
Post here your opinions of Btrfs, and if it’s ready for prime time, and if it’s better than ZFS. Fight!
Personally, I think Btrfs is ready. I’ve only played with it a little, but it is a huge game changer for distributions like openSUSE that adopt it. The file system has good performance, snapshots are a big deal and it is so much easier to work with than LVM.
In comparison to ZFS, well… ZFS has been around longer and is more stable (development wise, not crash wise), ZFS is cross-platform and works on Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris while Btrfs is Linux-only. ZFS has, in my opinion, nicer syntax and better documentation. However, Btrfs does some nice things at the file level, making it easier to do fine-grained restores and file diffs between snapshots.
It is possible to upgrade ext4 to Btrfs and you can’t do anything similar with ZFS (ie upgrading UFS to ZFS).
I guess Btrfs does a few nice things ZFS doesn’t, but ZFS is the more production/documentation/cross-platform friendly. I don’t think that makes one better or worse, just slightly different. I play with both and have been pretty happy with them.
Having no problems here with Btrfs on Neptune and my Jolla Phone.
Though I only use snapshots and tried lzo compression and some raid 1 experiments. From what I heard raid 5 is not recommened for every day usage.
The rest should work fine. (exceptions are possible)
When it comes to openSUSE itself I am little bit concerned about its quality.
Lets take for example the Nvidia drivers like the legacy one in the Nvidia OpenSUSE 13.2 repo. Its clearly not compatible with the Xserver OpenSUSE 13.2 ships. So I had to struggle to find the correct version to install it manually (yes manually).
This was harder than expected as the nouveau driver in the kernel 3.16 was not fixed (GPU Lockup) like in Neptune.
Strangely the kernel from 13.1 can be installed but does not use nouveau somehow. Very strange. I finally got the driver working by using nomodeset boot option and llvmpipe.
But let me guess a newbie would have given up on that one pretty much few steps earlier already. Too sad as OpenSUSE or SUSE back in the days was known for its Newbie friendliness.
Edited 2014-11-06 19:15 UTC
It’s pretty common for the NVidia repository to lag behind a new openSuSE release for a few days.
http://www.linuxscreenshots.org/?release=openSUSE%2013.2