Linux uses 8 spaces. Excerpt from the official style guide:
Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.
Rationale: The whole idea behind indentation is to clearly define where a block of control starts and ends. Especially when you’ve been looking at your screen for 20 straight hours, you’ll find it a lot easier to see how the indentation works if you have large indentations.
Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you’re screwed anyway, and should fix your program.
In short, 8-char indents make things easier to read, and have the added benefit of warning you when you’re nesting your functions too deep. Heed that warning.
Linux uses 8 spaces. Excerpt from the official style guide:
The reasoning seems sound, but I still prefer 4 personally.