Last time I installed Fedora on new hardware was with the last release that
still used the old Anaconda installer. I think it was F41.
I always ran ext4, but that time I relented and let Anaconda proceed with
the default btrfs format. I read the various tales of people who had btrfs
crap out on them, but I thought this was just water under the bridge.
Well, I regret making that choice, now. btrfs blew chunks today, and various
pointers from random search engine queries were no help. btrfs check, btrfs
scrub, and various other, random things, did nothing useful. I started
smiling when btrs check --repair started segfaulting on me, I haven't had
segfaults from stuff in /usr/sbin in a long, long time.
Finally I gave up when, after rebooting, btrfs volumes started getting
mounted read-only, I decided that I had enough, and it was time to wipe and
reinstall. I'm going back to ext4. To my surprise, the new Anaconda Web UI
installer, apparently, had quite a lobotomy. There was no way to pick the
filesystem format. It was going to drop btrfs around my neck again, and
that's the final word.
I look back, fondly, at the good old days when I simply ticked off a
checkbox that told Anaconda to use LUKS to encrypt the filesystem, pick the
filesystem format, and a few moments later that goose was fully cooked.
Those were the good-old days.
Eventually, I figured out the only way to get this done was to run fdisk
myself, then get myself a crash course in using cryptsetup, and run mkfs to
format each partition. Afterwards, go back into Anaconda, and tell it what
each existing partition should be mounted as.
I almost thought, for a moment, that I went back in time and was installing
Slackware, again…