I've played with most of them, I'm primarily a nixos user. I haven't yet had an experience as smooth as the FreeBSD installer for ZFS. looking at the debian wiki it still looks like dkms and manual partitioning are in order.

Comes in binary form from Debian and Ubuntu. I can add it to any other distribution via DKMS. Same core ZFS code as BSD uses.

Honest question - if it comes in binary form, how can you know it's the same core ZFS code BSD uses?

Same as anything else installed as a binary package - you trust the people packaging/providing the binary. If you don't, build it yourself. The source is publicly available.

Or you build it yourself and verify you got the same checksum.

https://reproducible-builds.org/

Debian only distributes it in DKMS form, not binary form.

ZFS on Linux and BSD share the same code now. Hope this helps.

Sure, but ZFS is much better integrated into FreeBSD. It supports ZFS on root with boot environments out of the box.

And when running a Samba server, it's helpful that FreeBSD supports NFSv4 ACLs when sitting between ZFS and SMB clients; on Linux, Samba has to hack around the lack of NFSv4 ACL support by stashing them in xattrs.

You can arguably get even better ZFS and SMB integration with an Illumos distribution, but for me FreeBSD hits the sweet spot between being nice to use and having the programs I need in its package library.

But on Linux you need to load external modules. Before upgrading or changing kernels you need to check if ZFS supports it. Specially bad in rolling distros.

>you need to check

This can be automated by whatever is updating your kernel.

It’s all OpenZFS now, same as Linux lmao.

Yes and no. OpenZFS on Linux still isn't as seamless and most distros still don't make it easy to do ZFS on root. Its definitely gotten better though.

I don't see any reason to use traditional ZFS on root when ZFSBootMenu is easier and better, also comparable to BSD's boot menus.

Is there a linux distro that makes the setup of zfsbootmenu easy? I found it to be quite a bit of work.

It's still out-of-tree though, isn't it?

Yes. I want to toss them $ but i’m not paying that much!

The DEA is the threat