The Future of ZFS on Ubuntu Desktop is Not Looking Good (UPDATED)
I hate to say it, but it looks like Ubuntu on ZFS is a dead effort.
In 2019 Canonical was upbeat about their support for contentious file system, making waves with the release of Ubuntu 19.10 which featured an experimental option to install Ubuntu (kernel, system files, and user data) on a ZFS volume. Ubuntu was the first major Linux distro to embrace ZFS, despite the tangle of issues around its licensing.
But since then the enthusiasm has waned.
Last year, Ubuntu developers pushed to remove Zsys from Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer. This is an integral tool Ubuntu created to make it easier to manage and maintain ZFS-based installations. In a bug report they bluntly noted that ‘priority changes’ in the desktop team meant Zsys was no longer something they want to “advertise using”.
UPDATE
More discussion in OS News:
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The future of ZFS on Ubuntu desktop is not looking good – OSnews
I thought the Linux world had settled on Btrfs as the “ZFS-like” file system for the platform, and had no idea Canonical had even been working on giving users the option to install to ZFS. With Btrfs already being the default on e.g. Fedora for a while now, it seems that is a better route to go for Ubuntu and other distributions than trying to make ZFS work.