I have a small 3 disk z1 storage pool on my desktop pc. It replicates to/from my file server (Debian) for backups with Sanoid/Syncoid. Root is regular ext4, i am using zfs for storage only.
I usually use LMDE6 (Debian with a Mint skin) as my daily driver.
Yesterday I assembled a new PC and unfortunately nothing on the Debian stable base wants to run on it even with 6.12 kernel from backports, I am still working the problem but if I am locked out until Debian13/LMDE7 obviously I need to distohop.
I am looking for a distribution that tests for zfs and is not going to break zfs support on update.
I might also try Debian testing or Siduction. How stable is zfs on Void? What else should I consider?
FreeBSD, maybe? When it comes to first-class support for OpenZFS, you really can’t beat it.
Granted, there are some things that you need to learn that are different between FreeBSD and your favorite Linux distro… but honestly, I don’t think it’s significantly more divergent from a system administrator’s point of view (as opposed to, say, a code auditor’s) than, say, Debian-derived distros are from RedHat-derived distros.
I may be wrong but my understanding was BSD was further behind with new hardware than even Debian?
I am a journeyman Linux user, neither noob nor guru, I have tinkered with free BSD on a few occasions, there is a lot to like, but it also kicked my ass.
Is BSD really practical as a daily driver desktop for reguar users?
I missed the “desktop” part, honestly. I could point you at GhostBSD, which is a way nicer desktop experience than the parent distro, but I don’t think that would satisfy you unless you actually wanted to switch to FreeBSD.
If you want Steam and so forth… stick with Linux. And I don’t know; maybe Void or NixOS?
Sorry, looking back at my question, I see it’s could have been cleaner. I was up late last night working on the new machine and rushed this question out this morning before work.
I have heard you mention GhostBSD before on the 2.5 admins podcast, it’s on my to do list to tinker with and see what it is about. It sounds like it could help me ease into BSD to add it to my skill set.
Void was already on my nvme that got swapped over to the new hardware, it was in that “tinker with” role, It seems to like the new hardware just fine.
I have Steam covered with a Bazzite install, it likes the new hardware also, but bazzite certainly could not be my daily driver. Its for gaming only.
Debian is being very stubborn about the new hardware, both in LMDE6 and Debian 12 KDE forms, neither xorg or wayland will start, tty only. I think it’s having a hard time with the AMD 7800XT GPU, I tried kernel 6.12 from Debian backports, still no. There is somthing else in the mix, Install USB will not start Xorg either.
I will give Void my local desktop zfs pool and see how it goes. I exported the pool before moving all the drives over. Void was fast on my old hardware, and doubly so on the new.
Why not Arch? It has the latest and greatest. I know it has a bit of a reputation wrt long term stability but I’ve had it on servers for years, just keep it small and don’t mess with the AUR (unless you want to of course, it’s great but may get messy). If you’re running it with a DE, try EndeavourOS, makes it really easy to get started.
Personally I’m slowly going NixOS more and more, I have it on 1 server with ZFS, has been working with no issues (1 was my own fault, you’ll find it here somewhere, I actually configured too much :p). NixOS has this reputation of complexity, to get started without anything fancy is really easy, and instead of apt installing everything you just add packages to a list. But of course it depends on how fancy you need to get, and how much willing you are to learn something new.
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I would recommend Fedora for a Desktop system.
Upsides:
Not as popular as Ubuntu but still quite popular so there are plenty of resources online if you need help.
It has the latest versions of software, instead of freezing at the release like Ubuntu and Debian. In many cases, Debian packages are not really usable because they’re so old and you end up installing software in a different way which defeats the point (I still like Debian for servers though!).
New OS release 2 times per year where updates with breaking changes are pushed. So no unexpected breaking changes like with a rolling release distribution (Arch). If you want to can skip every other version and update once a year.
Officially supported by OpenZFS: Fedora — OpenZFS documentation
Downsides:
You probably need to download at least a gigabyte of updates every week, way more than with Debian.
Fedora likes to use modern Linux technologies, so it may take a while to get used to. Debian sticks to the old tools for a while. Not that that’s bad, it’s just a different way of doing things.
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If you’re already familiar with Debian, why not try the testing branch or even the unstable branch? I’ve been using unstable for a long time. I rarely come across hardware that doesn’t immediately work with unstable, and despite the name, it’s not unstable.
The only thing I’d say watch out for with Fedora is that sometimes their kernel release cycle will get ahead of what’s supported in OpenZFS.
That happened recently with Fedora 41 - I wound up having to build a openzfs 2.3.0 release candidate from source to get up and running.
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This is a good point, I don’t actually use ZFS on Fedora so I didn’t know. Thanks.
Do keep in mind that Debian testing/unstable is not managed by the security team. Especially with testing it can take over a month to get a security update. It might be acceptable but should be carefully considered.
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