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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

It just seems weird to me to still be seeing RTFM more than a decade after I last received an actual FM for me to R.

A well-designed, general-audience technology product doesn't require one to be initiated into the mysteries before using it. The phone in my pocket is literally a million times more complicated than my first computer and I haven't read a bit of documentation. It works fine.

If btrfs wants to be something people use, its promoters need to stop blaming users for bad outcomes and start making it so that the default setup is what people need to get results at least as good as the competition. I have never read an extfs manual, but when I've had problems nobody has ever blamed bad outcomes on me not reading an extfs manual.

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Particularly as in this case I did read the fucking manual. I read every relevant page of the btrfs-wiki and the man-pages before building this filesystem. What I've found is there are still relevant implementation details documented only in the dev's head or the endless mailing list archives.

Btrfs has not been, is currently not, and unlikely in future to become a general population usable file system, which is a shame as 10 years ago it looked like a promising move forward.

Its window to it was when setting up ZFS included lots of hand-waving. That window now has closed. ZFS is sable, does not eat data, does not have a cult of wizards spelling "RTFM" and is can be installed in major distributions using easy to follow procedure. In a year or two I expect that procedure to be fully automated, to a point where one could do a root on ZFS.

I haven't tried this yet but supposedly the Ubuntu installer can setup ZFS on root for a very basic[1] install. (i.e: No redundancy, and no encryption. The former one could trivially add after the fact by attaching a mirror & doing a scrub. The latter you could also do post-install w/ some zfs send+recv shenanigans, and maybe some initramfs changes.)

I do use the Ubuntu live image pretty regularly when I need to import zpools in a preboot environment and it works great. In general it's not my favorite distro - but I'm happy to see they're doing some of the leg work to bring ZFS to a wider audience.

[1]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Ubu...

There's also a more full-featured guide in the OpenZFS wiki for setting up more complex configurations (mirrors, encryption, etc) for ZFS-on-root.

> In a year or two I expect that procedure to be fully automated, to a point where one could do a root on ZFS.

Ubuntu has been able to install directly to root-on-ZFS automatically since 20.04. I don't think any other major distros are as aggressive about supporting ZFS due to the licensing problem, but the software is already there.

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