Comment 170 for bug 317781

To conclude everything:

No distribution should probably ship with Ext4 as default because Ext3's behaviour was broken and everyone relies on it. And it should not be shipped with Ext4 as default for the same reasons while people are warned to use XFS: Potential data loss on crashes.

So as this means never-ever install XFS on a laptop we should now also say never-ever install Ext4 on a laptop. So what future will Ext4 have? Of course a bright one because everyone will use it anyway. Because Ext# was ever used as default and will ever be used. But in my eyes Ext4 should share the same future as XFS, ReiserFS or similar: Don't use it because it's bad in the one or other way.

These may be hard words but it would be logic consequence. KDE actually has a fix for this (KDE_EXTRA_FSYNC=1) but it's not on by default because of Ext3's broken behaviour and bad performance impact when doing that. So Theodore is true: applications need fixing (putting aside the commit-ordering bug which I still consider a bug and will be fixed in .30? Not sure). But how to get out of this dilemma? One cannot use Ext4 before the applications are fixed. But applications won't be fixed until Ext4 is rolled out and actually many people experience this data-loss. In the meantime one way or the other: Newbies won't be impressed: Either the software will be slow or it will loose data - either is bad.

Actually Ext3's bad performance was why I switched to ReiserFS. But ReiserFS has bad performance in SMP systems. So I switched to XFS. And now there will be a second player having the same issues: Ext4. Hopefully a way out of this dilemma will be found fast.