[GekkePrutser]

It's not unique at that though. FreeBSD has had this for a decade. And Ubuntu is adding it now as an installer option.

PS: I do like the idea of NixOS and its USPs which are indeed unique :)

For me what's stopping me is the learning curve. I don't mind learning per se but if I put the time in it I'd like it to be for something that's useful in more places. Like ansible.

[pxc]

What's interesting about NixOS' seamless NixOS support is that ZFS can't be included in the Linux kernel, and so that kind of integration takes more work with Linux distributions, so relatively few distros have it down pat.

BSDs don't face that kind of integration challenge, since they can just ship ZFS support directly in their kernels. They have recently faced an integration challenge of their own, though: rebasing their ZFS implementations on OpenZFS (f.k.a. ZFS on Linux).

Anyway ZFS is great and I hope OpenZFS' multiplatform support gets so good it can become popular on Linux, *BSD, and macOS all at the same time. :D

[altgans]

Can you elaborate a bit more on why ZFS is great? I am currently thinking about doing "one final install" for my system, and am undecided between BTRFS and ZFS.

I noticed that most "hip" people use ZFS, but based on my meager research it seems actually recommended and designed for "big" data-center setups.

Why is ZFS good for small PC setups?

---

If am being honest I just want something that works reliably, is easy to extend and doesn't require maintenance. Maybe ext4 is good enough?

[pxc]

If you have a single disk, BTRFS is probably as good as ZFS for you.

ZFS is mature and featureful, and it's easy to performance tune specific subdirectories using 'datasets' (on BTRFS you can do some of the same stuff with 'subvolumes'). It has good utilities for backup, including over the network. It always supports up to date, efficient compression (these days, zstd). It's good at pooling, so you don't need LVM if you want to be flexible about 'partitioning'.

One genuine advantage it has over BTRFS other than stable softraid support is that it's cross-platform among Unices, including (in incipient form) even macOS. So experience you gain in administering it would be transferable that way. (OTOH, Windows has a pretty mature BTRFS driver, but ZFS on Windows is even more recent (and difficult) an effort than ZFS on Mac).

Truthfully, ext4, BTRFS, and ZFS are all fast and stable, and once you set them up your filesystem, you'll probably hardly think about it. (If you go with ext4, I'd set it up on LVM to make it easier to extend or 'repartition' in case you wanna structure things differently or add another distro or whatever.)

Linux's heritage and continued use as a server OS makes it rich with fast, reliable, flexible, feature-complete filesystems. All three of your options here are better than what's on offer on any Windows or Mac desktop, so you kinda can't go wrong, so don't overthink it. Just pick something you feel like learning or whose documentation strikes you as agreeable and interesting. Whatever you choose will serve you fine until your disk dies or you get bored. :)

[joepie91_]

> I don't mind learning per se but if I put the time in it I'd like it to be for something that's useful in more places. Like ansible.

Depending on whether you mean "used by more people" or "applicable to more problems"... if the latter, tools like morph or NixOps might be of interest to you, which essentially extend Nix to "across multiple remote machines", which means that de facto you end up with an orchestration tool like Ansible or Puppet.

[SkyMarshal]

>It's not unique at that though. FreeBSD has had this for a decade. And Ubuntu is adding it now as an installer option.

Right, but FreeBSD isn't Linux, if you want both ZFS and the Linux ecosystem, then I would argue NixOS is the best at that right now.

I tried Ubuntu and ZFS recently in a VM just to see how it worked. The installer handles a simple, standard ZFS config just fine. But if you want to do anything more complex, then you're doing manual configuration, at which point it's better to just use NixOS, where all the manual config is done in the main NixOS config file.