They keep making this more and more difficult. Used to be you could just choose between yes and no. Then they made it so you can only choose between yes and no if you don’t have an ethernet cable connected. Now you have to use a hidden key combination and type in a secret command.

Soon you’ll only be able to install without an internet connection by downloading a special ISO with a hidden download link. Soon after that they’ll restrict said ISO to some insider program.

The two things I would recommend to any btrfs user is enabling zstd compression and setting up automatic snapshots using snapper or Timeshift. I would personally recommend snapper if you’re comfortable with command-line tools, as Timeshift only supports a very specific configuration.

zstd compression is very fast, so if you have a reasonably new CPU you will notice no overhead from it, making it effectively just free extra disk space.

Snapshots require a little bit of reading to understand, particularly because you will want a very specific subvolume layout to sensibly organize them, and distro installation wizards rarely give you such a layout except on distros that support snapshots out of the box, like OpenSUSE.

The Arch wiki page on btrfs is amazingly good, as is their page on snapper if you want to set up snapshots.

Btrfs can be a little complex and needs more user-friendly tooling for some of the advanced features to be useful to “laymen”, but OP seems technical enough (the fact that he cares about what filesystem he’s running in the first place is an indicator of this) that this should not be an issue.

As for “weird problems”, the majority of those seems to come down to users using advanced features without RTFM, and users having underlying system issues that cause issues that btrfs catches early and refuses to mount the filesystem as RW, and the users then blame btrfs for the issue.

Almost all data, aside from stuff like databases, benefits from filesystem-level compression, and almost every user benefits from having snapshots. Snapshots have saved my ass so many times, e.g. when I accidentally delete a file I shouldn’t have, or when a program has overwritten a file it shouldn’t have, or when Crusader Kings 3 corrupts my savegame.

As for bitrot, I frankly don’t know if btrfs has an automatic mechanism of fixing rotten files from an external backup of the filesystem (created using btrfs send), but even if it doesn’t it’ll tell you what has rotted so you can restore the files manually.

If you’re not intending to use complicated RAID setups, just go with btrfs. There is no reason to bother with zfs given your specs and needs.

Do not go with ext4. Unlike both btrfs and zfs, ext4 does not do data checksumming, meaning it cannot detect bit rot (and obviously cannot fix it either). You’ll also be missing out on other modern features, like compression and copy-on-write and all the benefits that entails. Once you start using snapshots for incremental backups using btrfs send (or its zfs equivalent), you’ll never want to go back. Recommended script: snap-sync.

I don’t have any expectations of them doing this (but I also have no expectations to the contrary), but I think it would be a good move from Red Hat to make the official RHEL more available, as you suggest.

In another thread I compared the RHEL rebuilds to piracy, and in that vein one could quote Gabe Newell and say that piracy is a service problem – part of the reason Alma/Rocky/etc. exist is because there is a group of users who want to use RHEL but cannot afford it. Red Hat seems to believe that these users should be satisfied with CentOS Stream, and maybe most of them would be, if they only gave it a try. But making RHEL more widely accessible, both to paying users and developers, would probably be good too.

You can’t build your own distro on the backs of upstream’s work, and then refuse to do the same with downstream. Even if you don’t see any value in it, someone does, it’s not up to you to decide that, or you have missed the point of open source entirely

That’s what companies like Microsoft do, or what Apple does: they prevent competitors from even existing, or from being as good.

This is not a matter of "seeing" value in what Alma and Rocky do, because their value is plainly apparent to anyone, undoubtedly including Red Hat: they're basically 1:1 RHEL clones, except you don't have to pay Red Hat to use them. It should also be plainly apparent to anyone why Red Hat would consider this a problem for their business; their main product is the effort that goes into producing and maintaining RHEL, so it is only logical that they would want to maintain as much exclusivity as possible on that product.

Alma and Rocky are competitors to RHEL in much the same way piracy scene groups are competitors to game publishers. It is obviously not a fair competition.

And the real problem isn’t really how Alma or Rocky will survive, they’ll have more work to do, but they’ll manage with the CentOS Stream code. The real issue is that acting like that will in the end, harm Red Hat’s business.

[snip]

And Red Hat flat out lying about how they’ll handle things in the future makes them utterly untrustworthy for businesses: are you going to base your business decision on what a company said today, when they already screwed you over twice? No.

No it doesn't. Red Hat hasn't screwed over their customers, they've screwed over a bunch of people who aren't their customers. Why would any paying RHEL customer feel screwed over by this?