dual boot filesystem setup BTRFS or not? dual boot

[silk latch]

been thinking on this a while, reading through conflicting opinions and I wanna do it correctly. I've never used btrfs or xfs, only ext4

so I have 480 GB NVME trying to gradually switch from win11 via dual boot (292 GB) 182 GB to use currently. I will be copying incrementally

my windows is 260 mb I'm thinking of just single EFI. going with refind

thinking to start with minimum size partitions, will be moved left once I steal from windows if it goes well, 50 root BTRFS w/ var subvolume, 50 home, separate media partitions. all BTRFS? I will probably make use of compress & dedupe, snapshots maybe only for root. want to be ready for a distro test partition too. is this OK or should I consider something else

Large programs on external drives sharing with NTFS and HFS+, just use BTRFS too or not?

[rough osprey]

I only relatively recently started using Btrfs, so take it with a grain of salt, but personally the biggest thing for me is that it makes it significantly easier to manage more drives with less partitions. I think one of my bigger questions with this set-up is what utility a lot of these partitions serve, and what utility Btrfs might give them? Particularly the media partitions feel like. Why? To me. I understand the home partition being separate to root; if you mess up your root, you still have your personal files; but by having that home partition, your media files are already safe in case of corruption. Beyond that, I don't particularly see what a personal media partition serves to gain from using Btrfs? Compression probably would be at best redundant, as large volumes of media should already be stored compressed, and deduplication also most likely wouldn't be necessary. If what you stand to gain from it is just the RAID capabilities, it's worth considering that the utility of RAID gets significantly diminished when over partitioning.

Ultimately the point of this isn't to get you to decide against Btrfs, but to give you an idea of the things you may want to consider while making decisions about how you manage your files. All things considered, I think it may still be worth making these filesystems Btrfs for the sole reason of simplifying. Much easier to learn how to interact with one filesystem than many!!!

P.S. after also recently switching to rEFInd I'd recommend starting with installing GRUB, and then when you're able to boot into Linux, THEN switch to rEFInd. It has an issue where, when chrooted, it won't generate the correct boot configuration of the system you're installing it on, it will generate a configuration that would work for the system you installed it from. So if you're installing from an installation medium, it'll generate the correct config for the installation medium to boot, but NOT the system that you're installing Linux on.

Sorry if that's a bit rambly, I'm a bit 🪴

[silk latch]

hey thanks for the thoughts on this! I really appreciate it. and no worries on it being wordy. It helped me stop overthinking

I decided to begin (the day after reading this) with endeavourOS, since I spent WAY too long reading docs, and had to try and be productive with other things (also got overwhelmed), but will walk through both arch and also I want to look into both nixos and gentoo soon for the learning experience! GRUB was a good option and has been better than I expected, thanks for the thoughts on it and I decided to start simple on XFS which has been an awesome experience so far. I will probably try everything one at a time!!

[chilly portal]

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