File systems are your interface to store your data. Modern file systems offer a hierarchical view of your data, though historical file systems have been flat.

However, your computer's hardware just knows about blocks of data. Your operating system is responsible for translating the nice, human friendly hierarchy into blocks of data that is written to a disk.

On Linux, you have the advantage of being able to choose from a variety of file systems, suitable for different workloads. When installing your operating system you may be given the opportunity to pick one. It's important to know what you're choosing, so I'm going to describe a bit of terminology, then descibe some common options.

Terminology

Journalling

In the case of a crash, it's helpful if you can determine what state your filesystem is in. One approach for this is to have a journal, where you write your changes to that before the rest of the storage, and in the case of failure, the journal can be re-played to get the file system into a consistent state.

Copy-on-write

Copy on write file systems, when re-writing new data to a file, instead of overwriting the old data, create a copy of the data, write to that, then update the original file pointers to point at the new data.

This allows similar atomicity guarantees to journalling, since either the pointers point to the valid new data, or they point to the old data.

fsck vs scrub

fsck stands for "File System ChecK". This is a step that can be performed on a file system before it is being actively used to check its integrity and fix errors.

This has the down-side that the file system can't be used while it's being checked, so for routine maintanence the file system must be un-mounted.

Some file systems instead offer a "scrub" operation, which can be performed while the file system is being used, and offers the same functionality.

File systems

FAT

FAT stands for File Allocation Table, it is a relatively old file system, files are limited to 4GiB in size and file names are case insensitive.

It has the benefit of being widely portable, being available on many platforms. For this reason storage devices are often pre-formatted as FAT, just so less technical users don't assume the device is broken and return it.

Its portability makes it useful for USB flash drives and the partition you use for /boot.

It would be a poor choice for your root file system.

NTFS

This is Microsoft's primary file system. Its data structures don't limit the maximum file size to 4GiB.

As a commenter pointed out, NTFS is case sensitive, but not through the Windows API, which maintains case insensitivity for compatibility with older software that assumed insensitivty, since it was dealing with FAT.

On Windows it is case preserving, so if you create a file called "Foo", you can read it as "foo", but when you list the contents of the directory, it is shown as "Foo", rather than "FOO", as FAT traditionally does.

This makes it a better choice for storage media, as Linux is also able to read it.

It is still inadvisable to use NTFS as your root file system on Linux, since it's primary use is reading disks that are also used by Windows machines, rather than being an installation's root file system.

ext2, ext3 and ext4

The ext file systems are Linux's primary file systems and are usually the default option when installing Linux distributions.

Despite having a similar name, they are different beasts. ext2 is rather primitive, only really useful with old bootloaders.

ext3 is more advanced, though active development has moved on to ext4.

ext4 supports journalling, uses extents for its storage and supports extended attributes, where additional metadata can be assigned to a file.

There are third-party tools to read ext file systems from Windows, but NTFS support in Linux is better than ext support in Windows.

XFS

XFS is a development from Silicon Graphics. It exceeds ext4's features, including the ability to take snapshots of the logical state of the file system, and was the source of extended attributes.

It is available on IRIX and Linux, so portability is not its strong point, hence would not be useful on a USB flash drive, but it is an excellent choice for your root file system.

ZFS

ZFS is a product of Sun Microsystems, later bought by Oracle. It is a very advanced file system, offering all the features mentioned above plus more.

This is a copy-on-write file system, unlike the above, which were either journalling, or wrote to the blocks directly.

Being copy-on-write allows for deduplication, since if multiple files have the same data, the file system can point both files to the same data, since if it's changed in one file, the other one won't have its data changed.

Live file system checking is possible with the scrub command, so downtime is not needed to perform maintanance.

It can use multiple physical devices as its storage pool.

Its license is incompatible with the Linux kernel, so kernel support is provided by a third-party module, which makes it possible that a kernel update could leave your file system unreadable, since the ZFS kernel module is un-readable.

Loading an external kernel module is slower than it being built in, so this impacts boot speed.

Despite its complexity, ZFS is also available on the Solaris and BSD unices.

BTRFS

Work on BTRFS was initiated by Oracle to be a competitor to ZFS, this is no longer the motivating factor, since Oracle acquired Sun, but BTRFS is likely to become the default Linux file system in the future.

It is nearly as featureful as ZFS, only missing the online deduplication, which the BTRFS developers expect to complete in a couple of Linux kernel releases.

Its design allows for a transition between ext and btrfs with the btrfs-convert tool, by saving the ext metadata elsewhere and re-mapping ext's data to btrfs extents. It still offers the original file system's data as a read-only disk image that can be mounted. Reverting back to ext is done by reinstating the ext metadata.

Unfortunately, it has a reputation of being unstable, corrupting your data and becoming unusable. This is a natural stage of file system maturity though, and BTRFS is my preferred root file system.