I think about this at least once a week.

I first became aware of the phenomenon of an enlightened anti-UNIX bundle in ZFS; in particular how it unifies lvm, RAID, and the filesystem. While zfs isn't universally loved, it seems that each hot new filesystem that comes out now adopts this strategy as well.

While this doesn't lead to immediate enlightenment about where the balance is, it does highlight an important aspect to consider: whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts. One way openzfs is more than the sum of its parts is that it closes the RAID write hole. The next step, whether it be stabilized in openzfs or otherwise, is to merge encryption into the stack: The current state of the art is to compose block encryption with zfs on top. But a better solution would be for zfs's object layer to encrypt its blocks itself. Because the blocks are not required to have a particular disk alignment or size, the filesystem can offer authenticated encryption without losing the random-access property, as well as granular keys, thus offering some clear advantages over the UNIXy composition method.

Actually I'm not sure how strong an example ripgrep is by comparison. Could a `find` replacement do the ignore patterns just as well? OTOH, does ripgrep offer better I/O and compute parallelism than a naive xargs/parallel?