I used to use Ubuntu a lot about 7 years ago. I saw the writing on the wall. Once they started forcing snap down people’s throats, especially. I’ve been on Debian ever since and have been very happy. I also have run many other OS’s and I feel that Debian is still a good blend of polished and still friendly to the hacker.

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hnlmorg a day ago | parent [-]

Yeah Debian is nice. But at the time of switching, only Ubuntu offered ZFS precompiled in their official repos.

I did, for a period, run some other distro with DKMS but that was a massive pain to keep up-to-date due to ZoL’s piss poor documentation and messy build tools.

This was quite a few years ago though. Long before even FreeBSD synced with ZoL for OpenZFS. So the problems I encountered have likely matured tenfold since.

But if I’m going to the hassle of installing a new OS then I might as well install FreeBSD again because I just prefer it to Linux (nothing against Linux in general, my laptops and PCs all run Arch and I’ve made a career from supporting a variety Linux platforms)

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pacija 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have FreeBSD directly on metal, with just ZFS datastore and vm-bhyve [1] directly on it. All my services are in separate bhyve VMs. Most of those are also FreeBSD-based but some that require docker are Linux-based (my radio [2] is azuracast [3] in docker inside Ubuntu as a bhyve vm on FreeBSD). This way I can setup zrepl [4] on host to periodically snapshot whole VMs and send them to another box or to external USB disk, and I'm backed up.

[1] https://github.com/freebsd/vm-bhyve

[2] https://www.dno.rs/radio

[3] https://github.com/AzuraCast/AzuraCast

[4] https://github.com/zrepl/zrepl

	▲	hnlmorg 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nice. I’ll have a read of those links. Thank you

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bionsystem 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you need Linux compatibility layer AND ZFS without a hypervisor, unfortunately it's hard to get close to a Linux host. I've never used FreeBSD or SmartOS in production (I did use Solaris and zones in the past) and I know ZFS support is first class in those. But I've been using both zfs-dkms and kmod-zfs in RockyLinux and the experience has been pretty pleasant (ended up chosing kmod because we only follow OS releases anyway and install time is better there). I'm sure the story is similar for OSes like AlmaLinux (which also get upgrades sooner than Rocky, and I would prefer to use it instead of Rocky, but it is a requirement for us).

On my desktop I also use ZFS with kmod on cachy and updates have been seamless so far.

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InsidiousWombat 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

was that like 5 years ago or more ? Debian "just have packages" for a while

	▲	hnlmorg 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Now I think about it, it might have been 5 jobs ago!! So possibly 10 years. Wow it’s scary how quickly time goes by!