Products · Product
Btrfs
Raised as a usability problem by 30 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 27 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Btrfs commands are complicated and non-intuitiveUnreviewed
20122026- Btrfs commands and UX are awkward compared to ZFS2025-08-31
- Btrfs snapshots felt much slower than LVM snapshots2022-04-17
- Hard to figure out how and why BTRFS behaves as it does; nothing is straightforward2021-10-09
df shows plenty of free space when the filesystem is fullUnreviewed
20122026- Hard to tell what is using disk space, making it hard to free up2020-12-23
- Df and du report inaccurate space usage, and snapshots silently filled the disk2018-10-30
- Filesystem wrongly reports being out of space, requiring manual rebalancing that sometimes fails2016-02-25
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 33 complaints
- Writes to a volume with a big delete in progress take ten to twenty seconds2026-09-21
- Operator errors can cause data loss or hard-to-recover situations due to tooling footguns2025-11-25
- Desktop lags badly whenever the btrfs-cleaner background task runs2025-09-12
- Removing a failing disk fails on I/O errors, forcing manual file deletion and repeated retries2025-09-11
- Btrfs commands and UX are awkward compared to ZFS2025-08-31
- Was unusable in multi-disk setups on older kernels2025-08-30
- Fsync calls are extremely slow, slowing package managers that use them heavily2024-11-24
- Userland tools keep every snapshot as a subvolume, creating huge numbers of files2023-07-12
- Filesystem became unusable with no fsck tool, leaving user unsure how to recover2022-05-18
- Btrfs snapshots felt much slower than LVM snapshots2022-04-17
- Tools gave no indication of required steps, so a RAID1 array became unmountable after disk replacement2022-03-07
- Hard to figure out how and why BTRFS behaves as it does; nothing is straightforward2021-10-09
- Tooling and usage are unintuitive and dangerous, especially recovering a RAID mirror after failure2021-09-24
- Confusing tooling leaves the user unsure what to do2021-05-06
- Hard to tell what is using disk space, making it hard to free up2020-12-23
- Snapshot layout is complicated and snapshots easily get exposed to the system's view2020-11-20
- Pools and subvolumes are confusing at first, even for experienced users2020-11-20
- Documentation is poor, making it hard to learn how to use Btrfs2020-08-24
- Deleting one 10GB file takes five to ten seconds of waiting2020-08-24
- Btrfs command and subcommand structure is a mess, making snapshot management hard without custom tooling2019-09-27
- Counterintuitive repair steps; the recovery mount flag and check --repair are confusing to use2019-09-27
- Drives with frequent snapshots slow down and hang for seconds at a time2019-06-09
- Admin tools and documentation are so poor that learning to use it properly is painful2019-01-28
- Df and du report inaccurate space usage, and snapshots silently filled the disk2018-10-30
- No clear official procedure to replace a failed drive; workaround takes days2017-08-24
- Rolling back after a system update is much more complicated than expected2017-08-02
- Btrfs commands are complicated and non-intuitive to use2016-02-27
- Filesystem wrongly reports being out of space, requiring manual rebalancing that sometimes fails2016-02-25
- Standard df tool shows plenty of free space when the filesystem is actually full2016-02-18
- System becomes unusable for the whole duration of a mailbox backup2016-02-18
- Documentation is poor and admin tools are awkward to use2015-03-02
- Btrfs commands are convoluted and counter-intuitive compared to ZFS2013-05-18
- Commands and capabilities are cumbersome and counter-intuitive to use2012-08-08