Google tells me that this is a fork of FreeBSD from some years ago, and that there is some desktop support and some degree of support for laptops, especially Thinkpads from a few years ago.
I'v tried it in the past because of Hammer storage (please do not call it fs), hw support at that time was far from good and desktop usability is reasonably low (though not much lower than {Open,Net}BSD) but without counting cluster's hammer by itself it's simply the storage we desperately need.
Think of a zfs log-structured instead of offer only snapshots. This means a complete protection against any accidental delete/overwrite since any write on disk create a new "checkpoint" and with proper file manager integration this means you can "browse history" of your's files and trees like they came from a VCS software.
So I could recover previously saved versions of e.g. a word-processing file? Used to use that back per-millennium on a Novel network with shared drives and it was very useful indeed. I've always wondered why that feature wasn't available in later systems.
Yes and not only, you can see file history, just like commit history in git&c, you can compute diff on-the-fly both for single file and entire trees, you can "undo" last write etc
There is zero filemanager integration, so only manual CLI operation with a UI a bit less comfortable than zfs, encryption have few limitations, physical volume management does not offer "built-in raids implementation" of zfs (but you can create volume on top of any supported raid config), deduplication is a bit resource intensive, replication is not clustered even if you can "mirror" (incremental mirrors included) any volume locally or on a remote machine in a way similar to zfs one...
Essentially is a zfs with a raw and a bit less intuitive UI with logfs and few nice extras.
Yep, I mean compared to zfs live dedup it use less ram but generate an I/O load similar to a full resilvering... In that sense from my point of view it's "intensive", however consider that I only play with it, I do not have a solid idea on how it can be in real world scenarios...
This is all accurate. It's a FreeBSD 4 fork that targets amd64 exclusively. (The latest FreeBSD release is 12.0.)
That's not to say it is stale or anything like that; the BSDs share quite a bit of code heavily thanks to the license. And DFBSD has some novel things that FreeBSD does not have: in particular the SMP model is still distinct; they have the novel HAMMER filesystem, which no other operating system has; and they lead FreeBSD on DRM graphics drivers porting from Linux and non-uniform NUMA support (i.e., Threadripper 2990WX). There are certainly other things I am forgetting or simply don't know about; I develop FreeBSD and don't use Dragonfly myself.
Think of a zfs log-structured instead of offer only snapshots. This means a complete protection against any accidental delete/overwrite since any write on disk create a new "checkpoint" and with proper file manager integration this means you can "browse history" of your's files and trees like they came from a VCS software.