Bug#1143565: Debian should default to XFS

On 04/08/2026 at 12:57, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
> 
> That's certainly a valid point. I take this to mean that you think we 
> should have technical arguments for one or another default, as opposed 
> to picking something just because someone else does it.

XFS cannot be shrunk. IMO this disqualifies it as default filesystem. I 
have seen so many users need to shrink a partition in order to free disk 
space for another partition. With XFS their only option would be to 
reinstall and/or back up and restore.

Also ISTR that XFS is more memory-hungry than ext4, and read about some 
operations which caused transient high memory usage. But maybe this is 
not relevant any more with current memory sizes ?

Maybe the default filesystem could be made conditional to the 
architecture, memory size, partition size... ?

Note: the default filesystem type can be preseeded.