Zfs has great support for snapshots (as mentioned by others) and built-in support for encryption. In addition it handles various types of device management/raid

Zfs has great support for snapshots (as mentioned by others) and built-in support for encryption. In addition it handles various types of device management/raid. Windows/ntfs has (not as good) volume management (dynamic disks) and encryption (bitlocker). But nothing like the snapshot functionality. In addition to "regular" backups - zfs snapshots can be used in order to present historic data alongside current state. For any new Linux (or bsd) distribution - I think you really need a special reason not to use zfs. There's even drivers for windows, macos, bsd - so it's possible to share disks/external drives with a sane fs with encryption support between installations (not sure how stable windows/macos is though). For dragonfly bsd, they have their own hammer fs with clustering features. For older Linux distros, xfs is well proven tech. And "ext" is of course "standard". I still believe zfs should be the default for new desktop/server installs. The one drawback might be memory requirements on embedded systems.