| Follow @jrssnet
West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
By the mid-2000s, Linux was blowing the doors off of FreeBSD performance wise in many areas that had previously been FreeBSD's strong points. In particular, storage - mdraid is RIDICULOUSLY more performant than geom raid, which I had been using very heavily for years.
Package management had also improved tremendously. In the 90s and early 2000s, the ports tree was pretty much the height of awesome in my opinion. By the mid to late 2000s, though... dude, it's hard to beat apt and yum.
TL;DR I eventually found myself using the minority shareholder OS that also performed worse and was harder to maintain than the majority shareholder, and I didn't like that position. So I started transitioning the majority of my stuff to Linux. The big problem was that ZFS, at the time, was still only on FreeBSD, and I have always been a HUGE proponent of ZFS ever since I first started using it with its very first appearance in FreeBSD mainstream, at 7.0-RELEASE. So for several years, I had to choose between the package management I could live with and better performance - or the storage I could actually trust implicitly. Those were some sucky years with some sucky hard choices for me!
Finally ZoL got stable, around 2010, and I could start transitioning EVERYTHING over to Linux and not have to make that awful decision anymore, and that's exactly what I did, rapidly.
The reports of ZoL being "unstable" are pretty wildly off base. I still see them a lot, but seriously... I've got machine-centuries of experience with ZoL, and it's been rock solid. I have had roughly three or four problems, in aggregate across all those machines and years, each one of which was due to something going wacky in between a kernel upgrade and a ZoL upgrade causing the DKMS module not to build. Fix was the same in all cases - just remove the DKMS module using apt and then reinstall it, then poof, everything's back, no data loss, takes about 5 minutes to remedy.
I absolutely recommend ZFS for SOHO use. I have ZFS in every client I do business with, literally, including the little independently-owned barbershop where I get my hair cut. =) I *do* recommend a bare minimum of 4GB system RAM, and preferably 8GB, though.
XFS is not attempting to address the same problems that ZFS is. So I can't really answer a question like whether it will ever be "better". It's not a copy on write file system, it does not have data integrity features, it does not have volume management, it does not have self healing features, it does not have block level replication, and I doubt it ever will have any of those things because it isn't designed to - it's a "traditional" filesystem, not a next generation one.
ZFS will be available for root partitions from the installation GUIs within the next couple of years, I would guess, because Debian has already announced that they will start shipping ZFS with the base system. Exciting news!