On Windows you mostly grew up with FAT. Be it FAT16 back in the early days or FAT32 closer to the 2000 era. Eventually NTFS — the New Technology File System — came into being and that’s where things kind of stayed. Even though NTFS was introduced in 1992, it’s still the default in Windows today, with only incremental updates since.
On Linux, the story is much broader. There isn’t just one default; you have a whole toolbox of filesystems, each with their own strengths.
EXT family
The EXT family (“Extended File System”) is the classic Linux equivalent of NTFS. It started with EXT, then EXT2, EXT3, and now EXT4.
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EXT4 is today’s default for most Linux distributions.
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It’s robust, supports massive drives (up to 1 exbibyte) and files up to 16 terabytes each.
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It was designed to fight fragmentation (a big deal back in the HDD era). While it doesn’t reserve space for the whole file at once, it tries to place file chunks close together on disk, so the old spinning drive’s read head didn’t have to dance all over the platter. On SSDs this matters less, but the principle still keeps performance predictable.
Think of EXT4 as the “NTFS of Linux”: tried, tested, boring in a good way.
Btrfs
Next comes Btrfs (short for “B-tree file system”). This is a more modern take, aiming to solve problems EXT4 can’t.
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It supports snapshots (save-points of your system you can roll back to).
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Built-in checksums make sure data hasn’t silently corrupted.
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It handles RAID-like features (mirroring, striping, etc.) natively, without extra tools.
Btrfs is powerful but has a reputation for being a bit more complex to manage. Think of it as Linux’s answer to “what if NTFS and ZFS had a child.”
XFS
Another common one is XFS, originally developed by SGI (Silicon Graphics) back in the ’90s.
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It’s excellent at handling very large files and parallel workloads.
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Servers that move giant media files or databases often pick XFS for raw throughput.
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Downsides: not as feature-rich as Btrfs or ZFS (e.g. no native snapshots).
ZFS
Then there’s ZFS (Zettabyte File System), which came from Solaris but is now available on Linux.
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Famous for its copy-on-write design: when you update a file, it writes the new data in a new location, then flips a pointer. That way you never risk losing data from a half-finished write.
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It has built-in RAID, compression, deduplication, and self-healing.
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Downside: it uses more RAM, and licensing has kept it from being bundled directly into the Linux kernel. You usually install it separately.
If you’re the kind of person who wants your data as safe as possible, ZFS is a great pick.
Swap filesystem
Linux also has a dedicated swap filesystem. Swap is like Windows’ pagefile — an overflow area on disk that acts as extra memory when your RAM fills up.
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You can create swap as a file or as a dedicated partition.
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If you go with the partition, it even has its own filesystem type (
swap).
Which one to pick?
For most users:
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EXT4 is the safe and stable choice, like NTFS.
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Btrfs is great if you want snapshots and self-healing.
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XFS shines with big files and servers.
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ZFS is the gold standard for data integrity, if you don’t mind extra setup.
That’s the beauty of Linux — you’re not locked into just one filesystem. You choose the one that fits how you’ll actually use your machine.