> Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. It used to be a major hassle around 2 years ago but since then things have evolved significant

> Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. It used to be a major hassle around 2 years ago but since then things have evolved significantly, up to the point where as long as you follow the install instructions correctly the first time, you can trust it to just keep on working. One benefit (for me) is the ability of having full system snapshots taken periodically with minimum storage cost. I've used a setup on my personal workstation for years where a zfSnap job takes snapshots every hour. This has proven itself to be super convenient when accidents occur. Of course that the important data is backed up externally or committed to Git, but having the possibility to quickly revert mistakes is a big nice to have. Such a system could also be easily improved to ship these snapshots to an offsite location as incremental backups. Of course the same process can be done in many other ways, but it is also other thing nice to have. Another benefit I've had with this is portability between machines. My current Debian Stable system with ZFS on root began its life running out of an external HDD plugged onto an old Macbook Air. After I was able to get an external SSD and a Thunderbolt adapter, all I needed to do was to add the new device to the existing pool as a mirror and wait for resilvering, then remove the old device after all data was mirrored and the migration was done. When I finally got a new laptop, all I needed to do was to boot from the SSD and add the new NVMe device to the pool as a mirror, then remove the old SSD afterwards. There is also the transparent compression feature that can potentially save a lot of HDD space depending on the usage pattern of the particular system. And of course since ZFS is there present in your system (as it's the rootfs anyway!) you can use all other features you want, such as slicing volumes to use as root volumes for virtual machines or to use it as the backend for a local Docker host, where Docker can use an specific ZFS driver and leverage filesystem capabilities when storing images. Of course you don't need to run it as the rootfs for many of these things, but you if do like ZFS then the benefits, possibilities, and the fact that you can do it outweigh the (nowadays reduced) hassle. :)