So, I used Fedora Media writer to burn the Fedora 43 Workstation ISO image to the USB drive.
Back in the day, for disk layout and related options, I get to choose LVM (Logical volume manager) if I wanted.
But, I don’t see the option for choosing LVM or even to choose my preferred filesystem type which is ext4.
The option with the most flexibility is the ‘Use entire disk’ (shown in screenshot below) but when I choose this option, I see on the next screen that Fedora installer has decided to use BTRFS for almost all the filesystems. Fedora installer has decided to use ext4 just for /boot.
But, I want to configure LVM and I want to use ext4 wherever I could. Is it not possible for fresh installations ? I could do this in Fedora a few years back but not in the current latest version which Fedora WS version 43. Maybe it has been like this for the last few years and I did not know
On 2nd screenshot there’s triple dots at the top-right; Storage Editor will let you do advanced partitioning (I did a 64M /boot/efi and XFS / a bit ago)
In my humble opinion, Fedora should move this ‘Launch Storage editor’ option which is effectively hidden under 3 dots to a separate option under ‘How would you like to install ?’ and name it something like
“Advanced Mode”
or
Simply “Custom”
or
“I will configure partitioning”
I figured Fedora couldn’t be wild enough to enforce Btrfs yet and just looked around a bit.
Every install I figured out something new to try and I’m thinking next a 32M/boot/efi (64 works fine with 20M used) and so far the new installer hasn’t stopped me from doing anything I wasn’t doing from the old Custom Anaconda option; if anything it’s cooler in forcing the manual partitioning a bit so I could do a /boot-less setup and mess with custom /boot/efi sizes! (I did Standard layouts on previous Custom and kept default boot stuff)
I found this problem two months ago. But there is still “nonstandard” solution:
That’s what I’ve used for my test workstation setup too. I would like to understand why the installer recognizes LVM so you can assign mounts etc., but it doesn’t offer a way to create partition/volumes using LVM?
There is a big divide between the mega-corporations with massive replication across data centres and individuals using enshitified consumer grade hardware. I once tried to a buy a couple of the same “enterprise grade” laptops we were issued (for use by visiting scientists) but was told they were only available for orders of 1000 units or more.
The bcachefs project does focus on minimizing data loss for people using unreliable consumer-grade hardware. I hope it succeeds.
I’m kind of curious why Fedora didn’t match Server with XFS default; XFS sounded cool when I first tried it on Fedora Server over ext4 everywhere else!
I’d use XFS over ext4, but didn’t real-world notice a difference; XFS on-paper being better with multi-threading and first-class’d on a Server edition makes it sound more interesting vs Btrfs for just data integrity (years of ext4, XFS, and NTFS were fine; I’m on ext2 root on NVMe now)
and just looked around a bit.