ZFS as root in Ubuntu 20.04

[GreyGeek]

The article is here.

[kyonides]

The only thing I recall about ZFS is how Linus Torvald refused to include ZFS stuff in the kernel due to conflicting license issues... :S

[oshunluvr]

Yeah exactly. My question is why bother?

[GreyGeek]

My thoughts exactly, but in the interests of even handedness for those who are true ZFS believers I thought it would be nice if they knew.

[jlittle]

Years ago, as soon as I learned that Oracle had moved to close the source of ZFS I lost all interest in it. (Oracle has an ethical history even worse than Microsoft in some respects.) I've looked into it (that is, I read the Wikipedia article) and there is supposedly independent body holding the source and it is openly developed, but there are still some involvement by Oracle.

Does anyone here have an opinion on this?

As well, given the resource usage and knowledgeable configuration needed, it appears to me to be unsuitable for any installation without a dedicated sys admin team. Would anyone disagree?

[oshunluvr]

IMO, ZFS isn't really intended for the casual user. While it has performance gains over BTRFS the increased difficulty to use and maintain it make it suitable only for an enterprise environment. BTRFS is exceedingly simple and adds features for the day-to-day user at a small sacrifice to performance.

[GreyGeek]

When I first explored ZFS it was obviously more complicated than BTRFS. Zpool, bpool, snapshots, clones, etc. Those I could get used to. But nearly 3 dozen settings, most of which were cryptic and bewildering (lots of things have become bewildering to a 79 year old - life used to be much simpler ) and it was then that I decided that ZFS was for servers and smart admins, not for Joe and Sally Sixpack. I could install ZFS as the root file system but I'd only do so if some app like TimeShift was able to make and restore snapshots.