ext4
Hacker ApprovedRanked 3 of 9 filesystems by recommenders
Default on most Linux systems and praised as a boring, reliable choice; critics note small-extent fragmentation and inode settings needing tuning.
27 people recommended ext4 in Hacker News comments, 3 had mixed feelings and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
Summary written by Claude from 34 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 31 of those comments still count.
34 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 27
- mixed feelings
- 3
- warn against or regret it
- 4
The record
Recommended in 11 of 12 months
In 23 different threads.
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
Why it carries the badge
- 27 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 6.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
- Recommended in 23 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- The biggest thread supplies 7% of its recommendersNeeds half or less, met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 31 of the 35 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Stable, boring and rock solid
“still very popular as a solid, no frills filesystem”
Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User” “it's been a reliable default OS for many years now”
Comment from 16 Sep 2026 in “GEFS on OpenBSD: A Early Preview” “I value boring and rock solid stability”
Comment from 8 Jul 2026 in “How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS” Works well with RAID and LUKS
“I've been using ext4 with SnapRAID and mergerfs for years without issues.”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User” “I never had this happen with ext4 alone or atop Linux raid.”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool” “was using LUKS + EXT4 -- with no issues whatsoever”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “CachyOS June 2026 Release” Default for most Linux users
“it is the default for the large majority of Linux users and the disk layout of choice for every system I install for normal people”
Comment from 12 Oct 2026 in “EXT4 Introducing IOmap Buffered I/O Path with Some Performance Gains” “ext4 for your primary drive”
Comment from 19 Sep 2026 in “Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip” Reliable when resized and at scale
“since enlarging live ext* filesystems has been very reliable”
Comment from 8 Apr 2026 in “Running Out of Disk Space in Production” “50TB+ on ext4 and xfs, and no, no bit rot.”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Small extents and fragmentation
“it isn't immune to fragmentation”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “SQLite concurrency and why you should care about it”
Other filesystems people recommend
The four most recommended other filesystems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 9 filesystems, rankedWhat people said
31 of the 35 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I'd happily go back to ext4”
“it is the default for the large majority of Linux users and the disk layout of choice for every system I install for normal people”
“Swap files are fine on ext4 and xfs”
“xfs/lvm-raid10 or ext4/lvm-raid10, obviously.”
“ext4 for your primary drive”
“it's been a reliable default OS for many years now”
“just run ext4 with a separate 128GB journal NVMe drive on a split PCIe x4 bus”
“I've never lost data on OpenBSD+UFS, unlike Linux and ext4 or btrfs”
“Hell, even HFS+ and EXT4 already were.”
“I value boring and rock solid stability”
“was using LUKS + EXT4 -- with no issues whatsoever”
“at least it reserves blocks for the root user explicitly so the system doesn't stop”
“our own KV store… which is more efficient than ext4 namespace management, even after doing very aggressive fs tuning for that”
“ext4 is only properly read/write under Linux”
“SMB/ext4 worked like a charm. Six years later and not a single hiccup.”
“Switched to ext4 and never looked back.”
“it's very verbose on the disk (needs type=small otherwise inodes run out before disk space”
“since enlarging live ext* filesystems has been very reliable”
“I never had this happen with ext4 alone or atop Linux raid.”
“50TB+ on ext4 and xfs, and no, no bit rot.”
“everyone uses btrfs or xfs or even ext4 with FDE without any problems”
“I've been using ext4 with SnapRAID and mergerfs for years without issues.”
“if I see a deploy with ext4, I classify it as a newbie's choice or someone stuck in the 80s”
“still very popular as a solid, no frills filesystem”
“I won't belabor my love for ext4 and basic tools”
“Linux’s VFS system + ext4 has a much stronger model than the general POSIX guarantees”
“Corey (a character of mine) says stick with ext4.”
“for every project that managed to out-grow ext4/git there were a hundred that were well-served”
“use ext4 with metadata_csum enabled, I guess”
“it isn't immune to fragmentation”
“That would both get you easier compatibility between Mac and Linux”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.