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ZFS isn't a real competitor given it's not in the kernel and has legal troubles.

Who is downvoting this? Among the large Linux distributions, ZFS is only really supported by Ubuntu, and even that is on the level "Canonical lawyers reviewed this and believe they're safe". If the unmentionable company ever goes to court against them, you're in hot water. You'll have to migrate to FreeBSD or support yourself by building dkms modules. So you're taking a non-zero risk by adopting ZFS.

If you're really conservative with these things, as some of us are, you currently don't really have a single safe COW pick. (Smug FreeBSD users incoming.) I have most trust in bcachefs over the long term.

> You'll have to migrate to FreeBSD or support yourself by building dkms modules. So you're taking a non-zero risk by adopting ZFS.

DKMS works fine. And you can also take the NixOS approach where it's not built into the kernel but the system will never actually install a new kernel unless ZFS is supported on it and successfully builds for it.

I agree that it's still not ideal, though. I hope bcachefs thrives and takes a place of pride in the Linux world!

It's very well supported by NixOS, been using it for a decade or so.

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