So I was interested myself and it really is a mess:

On Windows you have the creation time, which is also user-editable. The same is true on Mac, where it's called birth time. On Linux it's a complicated though. Initially it wasn't supported at all, as this is not a standard POSIX time, then some file systems internally supported it, and finally there was a way to expose it to userland with the newer statx system call, where it is called birth time, too. The issue though is that there is a different understanding of what the creation/birth time should be. There is no official way to change the creation time though. The normal way using utimensat only supports the classic three timestamps: modified, access and metadata-change. This is apparently because some linux developers view that the creation time should be immutable and only refer to when the filesystem object was created and not to be used for a universal system-transferable way to track when the data was created. I find this extremely stupid and their reasoning is also laughable, citing some ill-conceived "forensic" use-cases, when you can just modify the disk as root directly or change system time before creating a file.. But it is what it is. So currently, the creation time support on linux is in this weird limbo of sometimes being used this weird way or the proper way. If you really want to force it, there are some ways to modify the filesystem inodes timestamp data directly, eg with debugfs on ext4. But otherwise no easy tool exist, even though some tools eg. rsync has the --crtime option it apparently doesn't work on linux.

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-btrfs/cover/[email protected]/ https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/591388/422163 (Note, I have no idea how safe this is, probably unmount first)

So as you can see it's a mess of different support, naming and interpretation. It's a shame, because I really learnt to love the usefulness of the creation time on Windows systems.