Ubuntu's Zsys For OpenZFS Linux Installs Sees First Update In A Year

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu's Zsys For OpenZFS Linux Installs Sees First Update In A Year

Ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipping next week, a new version of their Zsys daemon/client for ZFS-based Linux installations has been issued...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Zsys-0.5.9

[MadWatch]

Such a shame. I had high hopes for ZSys. Which other distribution offer you the option to make a system snapshot every time you do an update and the possibility to revert to a previous snapshot from Grub in case something breaks and have all of it working out of the box?

[Chugworth]

Ubuntu has been doing ZFS backwards. Why were they putting the ZFS installation option for desktop installs and not server installs? I love ZFS but I don't think it's best suited for a desktop OS partition. Btrfs handles that just fine.

[Charlie68]

Sometimes Canonical choices seem incomprehensible but then everything will work out, see Unity, Ubuntu One etc!

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Such a shame. I had high hopes for ZSys. Which other distribution offer you the option to make a system snapshot every time you do an update and the possibility to revert to a previous snapshot from Grub in case something breaks and have all of it working out of the box?

OpenSUSE has been doing this for years with Btrfs / Snapper / Zypper. I'm amazed it has taken so long for other distros to follow suit, especially Arch based ones. I think Garuda was the first to adopt it among the Arch family.

[Chugworth]

OpenSUSE has been doing this for years with BTRFS, snapper, zypper. I'm amazed it has taken so long for other distros to follow suit, especially Arch based ones. I think Garuda was the first to adopt it.

Yes, Btrfs should be standard on most desktop distros by now, as well as snapshot rollbacks. That is an extremely valuable feature, especially on rolling distros that have a higher risk of breaking.

[skeevy420]

Ubuntu has been doing ZFS backwards. Why were they putting the ZFS installation option for desktop installs and not server installs? I love ZFS but I don't think it's best suited for a desktop OS partition. Btrfs handles that just fine.

Let's agree to disagree here. Valve' Steamdeck has a dual BTRFS/Ext4 setup because BTRFS doesn't handle their use-case just fine. ZFS, oddly enough, would have.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Such a shame. I had high hopes for ZSys. Which other distribution offer you the option to make a system snapshot every time you do an update and the possibility to revert to a previous snapshot from Grub in case something breaks and have all of it working out of the box?

I should have also mentioned that out-of-the-box in OpenSUSE offerings, Snapper is configured to also do pre/post snapshots for any configuration changes done through YaST2 (their GUI configuration tool, think of Windows Control Panel or macOS System Preferences). So not only can you recover easily from a bad package update, but you can rollback system changes as well. The hole in all of these solutions is the magic and complicated GRUB. If that gets borked, you are still up a creek.

[Developer12]

Yes, Btrfs should be standard on most desktop distros by now, as well as snapshot rollbacks. That is an extremely valuable feature, especially on rolling distros that have a higher risk of breaking.

Far too buggy.

Propensity to eat the whole filesystem when there's a disk media error in the right spot, spiral-of-doom freespace pathologies when more than half the disk is full, and then the forever-broken raid implementation that the devs outright warn against using. The list goes on.

BTRFS has been perpetually unfinished for over 10 years now and I doubt it will ever get across the finish line. Honestly, nobody should be using it in it's truthfully-developmental state.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Far too buggy.

Propensity to eat the whole filesystem when there's a disk media error in the right spot, spiral-of-doom freespace pathologies when more than half the disk is full, and then the forever-broken raid implementation that the devs outright warn against using.

BTRFS has been perpetually unfinished for over 10 years now and I doubt it will ever get across the finish line. Honestly, nobody should be using it in it's truthfully-developmental state.

And yet 2/3 of the big enterprise backed desktop offerings are using it by default, one of them for many years. I have doubts about RAID 5/6 ever being fixed, but the rest comes across as fear mongering. And this is coming from someone who uses ZFS for bulk storage.