Bug#1143565: Debian should default to XFS

On Tue, Aug 04, 2026 at 04:50:01PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On Tue, 2026-08-04 at 15:30 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> > > We shouldn't really diminish the value that comes with Debian's universal
> > > usefulness. Of course, if your use case is installing Linux on a standard
> > > x86_64 laptop for internet browsing, you might not see that flexibility,
> > > but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> > 
> > The "universal" here gives no guidance at all on a default filesystem
> > for installation, which is the question here. Any of the systems we
> > support should be able to work well with any of the options we might
> > consider here.
> 
> Yes, should be. That doesn't mean that's it's automatically going to be
> the case. For ext2/3/4, we know for sure it will work well on any system
> Debian supports. For XFS, that's not so sure.
> 
> > Not everything has to be a special snowflake on every axis here.
> 
> That's got nothing to do with being a snowflake. Different distributions have
> different usecases and that's okay. FWIW, SLES/openSUSE doesn't use XFS but
> BtrFS by default.
> So, why not default to BtrFS then but XFS?

Indeed, why not?

I think your HFS/HFS+ argument is a strawman. Correct me if I'm 
wrong. But we also wouldn't consider FAT16, for probably the same 
reasons (which I think are: foregin FS, severe feature 
limitation, ...).

ext4, XFS, BtrFS are "native" filesystems, actively maintained. ZFS 
is likely out due to the licensing (and thus not-builtin) reasons.

Evaluating the three options seems good? I don't have a current 
overview of which hardware we actually try to support and what the 
requirements and stability of the mentioned filesystems are.
But then I also don't mind staying on ext4. If there are good 
reasons for XFS or BtrFS, please by all means change the default.

Chris