Oh yes, ZFS
As of Ubuntu 20.04 I’m not a big fan of Ubuntu anymore! For years I basically ran whatever the latest LTS was (which was more up to date than many colleagues!) and it was stable and I was content. I discovered that Ubuntu really needs to work on updating it’s packages. 20.04 as of yesterday is still stuck on Thunderbird 68, Digikam 6.4 and KeepassXC 2.4! Come on people!
I’m been hopping around and I really like Fedora nowadays, except that it has such a high update frequency and quantity. I have the feeling I’m pulling in a GB worth of updates every week. It’s actually not a big problem of course. With the recent release of OpenZFS I decided to checkout what Ubuntu offers these days. 20.04 installer has ZFS-on-root, 20.10 installer encrypted ZFS-on-root. Also, the package situation is slightly better on 20.10 (still on Digikam 6.4 though!). Well, if you choose the regular Ubuntu ISO (NOT Kubuntu) AND if you do NOT connect to the internet during setup AND do not use a passphrase with spaces, the ZFS install works well! Encrypted and all! RDR2/Proton works well too, just a bit of audio crackling. Seems not to hang anymore, unlike with Ubuntu 20.04. You can then install kde-standard to get your Plasma 5.19.
So that’s nice. No issues so far. I’m not yet sold on Ubuntu though, the package situation remains, and you can’t bunny-hop interim releases like in Fedora, so you’d need to upgrade or reinstall every half year. The downside of Fedora would be no out-of-the-box ZFS support, nevermind ZFS-on-root. Choices, choices…