OpenSUSE moving away from reiserfs with 10.2

OpenSUSE moving away from reiserfs with 10.2

Posted Oct 11, 2006 21:50 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
Parent article: OpenSUSE moving away from reiserfs with 10.2

My own personal thoughts are that, although one can choose the root filesystem when installing Linux, the default choice for a given distribution is akin to that distribution endorsing said filesystem. Conversely, the omission of a filesystem in the installation screens (assuming that that filesystem is fully supported by the Linux Kernel and supports permissions, ACLs, etc.) is like the distribution saying that they don't (or won't) support that filesystem.

For years, SuSE SUSE OpenSUSE has heartily encouraged users/sysadmins to use the "default" ReiserFS when installing the OS. In contrast, I thoght I remember using Red Hat 8.2 (or was it 9?) which didn't even offer ReiserFS as a root filesystem choice. (PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, it's just been a while since I dumped Red Hat/Fedora but that's another story.)

Forgive me for generalizing when I say that software distributors/vendors prey on users not knowing their choices when they ignorantly click the "OK" button. Microsoft does this often (assuming everyone will use Internet Explorer as their one and only Web browser). Even the Linux distribution I've come to love and respect, Slackware, defaults to ReiserFS, but I see the other choices (I'm perfectly happy with Ext3 on both my desktop and laptop) right there on the installation screen and know to make the choice I prefer.

Certainly the mere fact that some default choice is pre-selected by the distribution means someone has a motivation for making it that way. Just my $0.02...

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