It's a shame that btrfs seems to be dead in the water. I guess nobody with the resources to build such a filesystem actually needs its snapshotting and integrity features at the filesystem level?
"dead in the water" is incorrect. SUSE's SLES (I believe OpenSUSE as well) uses btrfs on root and XFS on home for default install. And SUSE systems are very far from "dead in the water" as it's employed in lots of big servers around the globe.
Just because Red Hat marked btrfs deprecated on their systems, doesn't mean the technology itself is deprecated.
Also, from what I've read, they deprecated it because of resources issues rather than tech issues (seems like they had 0 btrfs devs and lots of XFS specialists on the team).
btrfs supports xattr, it's also activly developed - there are always improvements in each new kernel release. Personally I'm avoiding it because I've got burned enough times with btrfs and the current >0.7.x ZFS on Linux versions with ABD work very well for me.
While I have been burned by btrfs and I'm using it very warily, I agree that stability has improved dramatically over the last year or two. Also they make it more clear which features are done and which are not: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status
Does it really gain steam? Last time I checked the CDDL license incompatibility with GPL made it impossible to ship ZFS with Linux, and as such, distros have separate packages not maintained by the core team (I'm thinking of Arch right now).
For the record I would be very glad if I could seamlessy use ZFS, but from my perspective it looks like a lot of work that can break in unexpected places.
NixOS has ZFS. I don't have long-term experience (switched to NixOS only two months ago or so), but the installation is pretty simple: (1) boot he installer CD, (2) add a line to your configuration to enable ZFS support, (3) switch to the new configuration. And then you are ready to install on ZFS root. Encrypted root also works.
Ironically, I felt less of a need to use ZFS on NixOS. I don't have a large pool and snapshotting the system is not really necessary, since in NixOS you can always roll back to a non-GCed previous version on your system. But I use filesystem compression and might use snapshots on /home.
There is no trolling whatsoever. ZFS was originally made by Sun and Sun was acquired by Oracle almost 10 years. ZFS is owned by Oracle and is a legal minefield.
For desktop use btrfs is still a better choice than zfs due to its ability to restripe almost arbitrarily and do on-demand defragmentation and deduplication.
