XFS is currently recommended over EXT4 by Gentoo and SerpentOS.
Haha. That's a good enough reason for me not to use it. Just kidding (or maybe I'm not).
EXT4 has a lot of limitations, particularly for hardlinks, but is still receiving regular updates.
65k hardlinks per inode limit is a valid concern for those whose applications may require to have more, of course. I would call this a rare edge case scenario, but it's still a valid one.
Otherwise, ext4 is a mature production-ready file system, which is widely used as such, has been around for decades and is the default fs in countless setups.
As for powerloss data corruption, F2FS is particularly suceptible to this. XFS may still be. But an SSD is likely much less likely to have this happen since writes are made much faster than on a HDD. I think any FS is susceptible to this--but the kernel developers are now pushing "atomic" writes that should help mitigate this issue somewhat.
That's not the kind of data corruption I was talking about. What you mentioned is corruption of data that was pending write when a power loss happens, correct? Of course this can be an issue with any fs, to a varying degree (from writing partial data to writing all or nothing, if proper atomic writes are implemented).
What I mentioned was
loss of entire files that simply had to be
open()'ed (I'm not sure if open for writing was necessary or open for reading was sufficient too) to be affected by this.
https://superuser.com/questions/84257/xfs-and-loss-of-data-when-power-goes-down...and more links can be found, but they're mostly old. I can't quickly find a good article describing in detail exactly what I experienced back then. Maybe it has been fixed since. But I don't trust it anyway. Besides, with modern drives I see no reason to use anything but the battle-proven ext4, except for the situations when specific features may be required, like those supposedly provided by btrfs and maybe others.
To be honest, I did try to use XFS a couple of times since then -- of course only for partitions holding cache/temporary files, but which would benefit from faster access. But I did not notice any performance improvement over ext4 in my tests, so I ditched the idea.
However, the current testing branch (eventually to become the next stable release) is almost always good to go with for a desktop. It receives reasonably fresh updates, though not always the very latest ones, it rarely has any issues with package dependencies, and I see no problem recommending it for a general Linux user except maybe a very beginner one.
I agree, but this isn't something that a newbie would know. I've never run into a packaging dependency issue with Fedora, but I've only used it since version 39 (and I have used many RPMs that are old as hell--mainly for my 20 year-old Brother printer).
Well, I would say that a newbie can more or less equally easily run into issues with any distro. And with any distro, a newbie can quickly become a non-newbie if learning the OS more deeply presents any interest -- and I think that with Linux it's more a necessity than an aimless curiosity.
Another point is that these days the amount of documentation and community support on the internet in general is huge. Which makes me think that for a newbie the best distro to choose would be the one that has a good compromise between the size of the community and the skill level of a typical member of the community. I've not used pretty much anything beyond Debian (and Ubuntu, which is the same thing, though lately it started to somewhat diverge with this "snap" bullshit of theirs) and, in the distant past, RHEL/CentOS, so I'm in no position to compare, but, from the information seeker's perspective, I want to point out that Arch seems to have a great community and they surely have an excellent knowledge base at wiki.archlinux.org, which kinda suggests that those folks know what they're doing.