Text is compatible with all the grep, awk, sed, text editors, what have you. As for the argument of it binary saving space, not on modern filesystems with compression, like zfs, btrfs, and bcachefs. The entire resistance against tampering is bogus, any systems where that is a concern already live scrape logs to an off server indexing service. If you are concerned about poorly formatted logs, that is an application configuration issue. Address it directly with the application. There are no benefits to a binary log, especially when journalctl is absolutely no faster at jumping to the end of the long log than standard less is. Poettering has you chasing phantoms. He always does. He’s like the politician who justifies horrible bills by saying it’s to protect the children.