It is possible to convert from ext4 to btrfs, but if you just installed the server it may be easier to just reinstall.

Failing to mention that JAR is just a ZIP file with special contents and calling tar a compression format sure is a bit incompetent for a textbook.

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.

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.

It automatically uses Proton for titles that Valve has whitelisted as compatible. To play anything else you need to check a box in the settings. Honestly, it should probably just be checked by default.

Initially I was using rocky+podman but inevitably hit something I wanted to run that just straight up needed docker and was too much effort to try and get working. 🤷

As someone who’s used Podman for a while, though possibly not as extensively as you, what was it you hit that needed Docker? So far I’ve gotten everything to work with Podman, though sometimes I’ve had to RTFM and specify some extra command line parameters.

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.