This is completely orthogonal, and not particularly relevant. That said, I didn't know this was the case. In fact, I'd assume an unspecified mkfs would complain these days.

1) mkfs is a userspace utility. Its defaults have no consideration for which kernel driver implements this interface; I'd bet a dollar that mkfs has been hitting the ext4 driver for ages. 2) As stated in sister comments, support for actual ext2 filesystems is unaffected. 3) Using a very simple fs by default seems like a good thing. FAT (variants) has survived forever by being dirt-simple, despite its faults. 4) Who in the world doesn't specify options to mkfs? It's one of the few operations that really doesn't have "sane defaults".

Is there a "better" default fs? I dunno. I've looked at a few, but most seem... troubled. So many trade-offs.

If there is going to be a default, it is inarguably more reasonable to pick ext4 than ext2.

Huh. I hadn't checked it, but plain mkfs does create ext2. Interesting. I agree, ext4 seems a sensible baseline today.

This is a lot of words but yes anything that’s not deprecated is an obvious sensible default.

As I understand it, the ext2 format isn't deprecated. The original driver that ONLY supports ext2 is deprecated.

However, the ext4 driver also supports the ext2 format, and there are no plans to deprecate the ext4 driver.

mkfs(8):

> This mkfs frontend is deprecated in favour of filesystem specific mkfs.<type> utils.