TrueOS revisited - Now on Linux!

[Arwen]

Okay, so that title was a bit of hyperbole. But, one of the reasons I don't use some of the popular Linux distros at home is that I can't get root on ZFS easily, with boot environments.

Anyone want a Linux distro with full ZFS support AND ZFS based boot environments?
Similar to what FreeBSD has? (Which the old TrueOS was based on...)


I was reminded tonight that Gentoo Linux is not ideal. While updating the new laptop, I tried to move AisleRiot Solitaire to the new repository scheme. (The old was deprecated a few months ago.) But all I did was loose my existing Solitaire :-(. But, I can always go back in history to the prior boot environment. Then create a new boot environment again, and not screw it up this time.

For those interested, the Gnome package overlay was zeroed out because someone thought it was not in use. But, I was not able to find a replacement for AisleRiot Solitaire in another repository. The horror and chaos! He should be persecuted! Okay, I will work around the problem somehow... can't loose my only 2 games, Gnome Mines and AisleRiot Solitaire.

 

[Ericloewe]

Ubuntu looked like it was going to do it, then they got sidetracked with the zsys nonsense. It's overengineered and underdeveloped, accomplishing few of its goals and causing great pain to all involved.

 

[Jailer]

Gaming is the only thing that keeps me on a windows machine for my daily driver. While I don't do as much of it as I used to, I still do some. Yes I know there are workarounds on Linux and it's a lot better than it used to be but it's still not quite there yet. If it were I'd ditch windows in a minute.

I just wish I could live with a FreeBSD desktop as my daily driver, I love the way FreeBSD does things. But you just can't game on it and that's a deal breaker for me.

 

[Arwen]

Yes, Ubuntu and another Linux distro had root on ZFS, but neither is really an option today. (As Ubuntu does not natively support boot environments, and the other distro died years ago...)

The silly thing is that Linux people always bring up BTRFS and now BCacheFS as alternatives to OpenZFS. The first, after 14 years, still does not have completely reliable RAID-5/6 support.

And the second, BCacheFS, uses "The COW filesystem for Linux that won't eat your data" as it's tag line. That implies BTRFS eats data, (as ZFS on millions of computers clearly shows it does NOT eat data...). Plus, BCacheFS has missing features, well, like scrub, on-line file system check, no R/O snapshots, and RAID-5/6 support is unclear. Then it clearly states "a cleaner, simpler, higher performance design" which implies it won't be adding tons of features, (because then it would not be "simpler").

Some references for BCacheFS:

Roadmap

Roadmap

https://bcachefs.org/bcachefs-principles-of-operation.pdf

Now I wish BCacheFS well, though I do consider BTRFS a lost cause at this point. That leaves COW file systems on Linux to BCacheFS, which is 10 years behind OpenZFS. Kinda sad...

 

[Davvo]

Typical Linux move: ignore something that works well and create something that does the same thing but in a different, often worse, way; dockers I'm looking at you.
The more I look into Linux the less appealing it looks to me (which sounds like abyssus abyssum invocat), the developing approach in particular; long live FreeBSD.