I have 64 GB of memory in my desktop with 16 GB of zswap. Can’t say I’ve noticed any difference because I haven’t actually been in a situation that uses all this memory yet (aside from some programs leaking memory), but the thought of getting “free” RAM is appealing to me.

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.

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?