A Brief Word About Btrfs
A fair-minded reader will point out that Linux has its own copy-on-write filesystem:
Btrfs. And openSUSE's integration of Btrfs with Snapper deserves genuine credit.
Snapper, developed by Arvin Schnell at SUSE and first shipped with openSUSE
12.1 in November 2011, creates automatic snapshots in pre/post pairs around every
zypper transaction. GRUB is patched to offer a submenu for booting from snap‐
shots. The rollback workflow is coherent: reboot, select the snapshot, verify, run
snapper rollback , reboot again. On openSUSE, this works out of the box.
The caveats are worth mentioning. Btrfs's RAID5 and RAID6 implementations
still carry an official data loss warning in the documentation, a caveat that has per‐
sisted for years. ZFS's equivalent (RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3) has been production-
ready since 2005. Btrfs has no equivalent to zfs send and zfs receive for efficient
incremental replication between hosts. And while Btrfs reached general production
readiness around 2015, ZFS had a decade's head start.
None of this makes Btrfs a bad filesystem. It makes it a younger one. And the
openSUSE team deserves genuine credit for building what they have built.
But even in the best case, the Btrfs workflow on openSUSE is a distribution-level
achievement. It is SUSE's integration work on top of a filesystem, a bootloader, and a
snapshot manager that are all developed separately. The GRUB integration is
openSUSE-specific; other distributions using Snapper do not get the boot-from-
snapshot feature without additional patching. The whole edifice is one team's excel‐
lent work within the assembled model. On FreeBSD, it is one team, one repository,
one design, one release.