The Journey of Linux’s ext2 Filesystem Comes to an End
Let’s start with a bit of history. Developed as the successor to the original Extended File System (ext), ext2 was introduced in January 1993, engineered to overcome the limitations of its predecessor and the FAT file system, which was widely used in DOS and Windows environments then.
Over the past three decades, ext2 has been an integral part of every Linux kernel version, serving as the go-to filesystem for Linux distributions until the turn of the millennium, around 2002-2003.
However, like all technologies, ext2 has reached its twilight, giving way to newer, more advanced alternatives, in that case in the face of the ext3 file system. The transition from ext2 as the default filesystem to more advanced filesystems like ext3 happened at different times for various Linux distributions.