Debian-based siduction gains snapshots, new recovery tools and more The latest release of siduction – a Debian "sid" based meta-distro – sneaked in before the end of the year, but while it dropped some features, it gained some important new ones too. As we mentioned when introducing Rolling Rhino, siduction is the best-known rolling release derivative of Debian. If it's not obvious, the name …
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Yes, you can choose a different filesystem, but as ext4 does not support snapshots, if you pick that, you lose the rollback functionality.
As far as I could see, neither Bcachefs nor ZFS were options, and at the moment, those are the only other Linux filesystems that support COW snapshots.
I have not tried Bcachefs yet; it's not very completely finished.
(The problem is that, arguably, neither is Btrfs.)
I would love to see a rolling-release distro with ZFS support.
"I would love to see a rolling-release distro with ZFS support."
What's the current thinking on the licensing issues involved? In other words, how much lawsuit risk would there be -- not for rolling release in particular, but for including ZFS "in the box" in any Linux distro?
I can assure you, siduction does not default to Btrfs. We left ext4 as the official offer, but you can choose Btrfs in Calamares if you want to use snapshots managed by snapper. And Debian Sid nowadays is much more stable than many people think. If you are capable of reading and use that ability to read what apt has to say on upgrades, you are pretty much safe.
For what it's worth (probably not much), I ran 'sid' for a year or two (more than a year or two ago) and didn't find it unstable.
You might not want to run your server farm on it, but as a day to day base for a desktop, unless things have changed, I found it perfectly usable. Having said that it will certainly help to have a clue about what to do if/when things do go wonky. :-P
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I've experimented with Sid, and Arch, and yes, as you say, it was workable.
But I ran openSUSE Tumbleweed as my daily driver for about 4 years, and it was mostly fine.
It did occasionally self-destruct, but I slowly worked out why. Root on Btrfs was good, for the snapshots, but you can't use a small root partition like on non-snapshotting distros. I normally give Debian-family distros say 16GB for root, maybe 32GB for a big system with a _lot_ of software.
That is *not* enough for a snapshotting OS. Think of 1/4 or 1/2 a terabyte for root. Disks are big and cheap now.
My Btrfs-zealot colleagues recommend one big partition and not separate `/home`. Since I have seen Btrfs self-immolate so many times, my response is "How about NO?"
But a big root volume is essential. Btrfs makes it worse by not giving honest answers to `df -h`. Yes, there are special Btrfs commands to show available space. That is no use. If `df` lies, that means that your file manager lies, whatever desktop you use. It means that all other Linux tools that try to estimate free space lie too.
It also means that the openSUSE packaging tools check for free space before installing updates, and they get a lie, and they proceed based on that lie, and sometimes a snapshot then fills up the filesystem, and the upgrade fails *and* leaves you with a corrupted disk.
That is why I really want to see snapshots and rollback on other filesystems than Btrfs: because snapshots fill your disk up, and a full disk kills Btrfs.
The other thing that killed Tumbleweed was nVidia drivers.
Neither of these are inherently the fault of the distro. The distro is solid. The filesystem *isn't* solid, but there are workarounds. And proprietary drivers are not solid or trustworthy, but that's a problem for every distro -- it's just worse for rolling-release ones.
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