filesystem

When you use Windows you use File Explorer when you use MacOS you use Finder. These may seem like file systems but they're actually the file managers. Linux lets you pick between several but the filesystem is how the computer manages files in a technical way. For instance, Windows uses the file system NTFS, which means that if you want to use Windows you'll have to format your disk and use NTFS as the filesystem. In an ecosystem with only a single choice this doesn't matter but on Linux there's several to choose from and each have merits and uses, so which one is even right?

Picking your filesystem

Unlike something like your init system, pretty much every distro lets you pick a file system. There's a lot of file systems so to lessen the stress of having to choose you can really mostly focus on these three options:

Ext4

This is one of the older filesystems but many still use it. It's not sophisticated but it's simple and it's fast. It features some cacheing for speed but doesn't compress files so it can use lots of storage space. Because it's older it also lacks native snapshots (meaning that it doesn't natively recover so you can't rollback if something goes wrong). Ultimately it's largely been replaced by the following two.

Zfs / Btrfs

Unlike Ext4, both of these choices are much newer and feature lots of very important QoL features that the average Windows or Mac user has come to expect by now.

They both offer advanced compression (limiting the amount of space that temp files take up) and they both offer snapshots. If you're wondering what a snapshot is, a snapshot is the Linux equivalent of a system restore point.

If you've ever had to repair a Windows install you probably know that Windows will make big back-ups of the state of your computer after every major system update. Linux does the same thing when you use these filesystems only that they're much smaller, they happen every time you install something (meaning you have more control over when you go back) and they're less prone to corruption than Windows versions tend to be.

In the section explaining rolling releases I explained that they can occasionally break. Zfs and Btrfs both essentially render this a non-issue because anytime a major change happens to your computer that could prevent it from working you can simply rollback and wait until there's a fix or attempt to fix it yourself and they take almost no space in the process.

Regardless of what level user you are Btrfs is almost always the right choice unless you have weird hyper specific needs like managing servers.