While the proposal is majorly about the transitioning from ext4 to Btrfs filesystem by default for laptop and workstation installs of Fedora, and across x86_64 and ARM architectures; Fedora team has also organized a test day to experiment with the Btrfs filesystem features.
And if the proposed change passes all tests, then it should be expected that the change to Btrfs filesystem by default would arrive for the next Fedora 33.
Why the Switch from EXT4 To Btrfs Filesystem?
Btrfs Filesystem brings a lot of benefits, ranging from resolution of several problems like running out of space, data storage corruption, filesystem resize, and other complex storage setup; also the primary goal of Btrfs Filesystem is for operations that are largely transparent to users.
And the number of modern features that Btrfs support are all marked as stable, which features can be checked out from the wiki list of Btrfs status.
Asides from Fedora Linux, Btrfs filesystem is used by default by openSUSE and Kaisen Linux; and since Fedora is a community distro and an upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it is expected that RHEL may also switch to Btrfs once Fedora adopts it.
What's the Way Forward for Fedora?
Fedora desktop edition/spin variants will switch to using Btrfs as the filesystem by default for new installs. While Labs derived from these variants will also inherit this change, and other editions may opt-in as well.
The change is based on the installer's custom partitioning Btrfs preset, which has been well tested for about 7 years.
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