Readit NewsEdit: I can't find evidence that this is true, and I think I might have been tricked. But growth is at best quite anemic. See longer comment below.
In the last 10 years, btrfs:
1. Blew up three times on two unrelated systems due to internal bugs (one a desktop, one a server). Very few people were/are aware of the remount-only-once-in-degraded "FEATURE" where if a filesystem crashed, you could mount with -odegraded exactly only once, then the superblock would completely prevent mounting (error: invalid superblock). I'm not sure whether that's still the case or whether it got fixed (I hope so). By the way, these were on RAID1 arrays with 2 identical disks with metadata=dup and data=dup, so the filesystem was definitely mountable and usable. It basically killed the usecase of RAID1 for availability reasons. ZFS has allowed me to perform live data migrations while missing one or two disks across many reboots.
2. Developers merged patches to mainline, later released to stable, that completely broke discard=async (or something similar) which was a supported mount option from the manpages. My desktop SSD basically ate itself, had to restore from backups. IIRC the bug/mailing list discussions I found out later were along the lines of "nobody should be using it", so no impact.
3. Had (maybe still has - haven't checked) a bug where if you fill the whole disk, and then remove data, you can't rebalance, because the filesystem sees it has no more space available (all chunks are allocated). The trick I figured out was to shrink the filesystem to force data relocation, then re-expand it, then balance. It was ~5 years ago and I even wrote a blog post about it.
4. Quota tracking when using docker subvolumes is basically unusable due to the btrfs-cleaner "background" task (imagine VSCode + DevContainers taking 3m on a modern SSD to cleanup 1 big docker container). This is on 6.16.
5. Hit a random bug just 3 days ago on 6.16, where I was doing periodic rebalancing and removing a docker subvolume. 200+ lines of logs in dmesg, filesystem "corrupted" and remounted read-only. I was already sweating, not wanting to spend hours restoring from backups, but unexpectedly the filesystem mounted correctly after reboot. (first pleasant experience in years)
ZFS in 10y+ has basically only failed me when I had bad non-ECC RAM, period. Unfortunately I want the latest features for graphics etc on my desktop and ZFS being out of tree is a no-go. I also like to keep the same filesystem on desktop and server, so I can troubleshoot locally if required. So now I'm still on btrfs, but I was really banking on bcachefs.
Oh well, at least I won't have to wait >4 weeks for a version that I can compile with the latest stable kernel.
The only stable implementation is Synology's, the rest, even mainline stable, failed on me at least once in the last 10 years.
I had to disable quota tracking. It lags my whole desktop whenever that shit is running in the background. Makes it unusable on an interactive desktop.
Of course, the narrative suits the wealthy owners of the media, so the story gets repeated anyway.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/07/the-british-we...
:D
At some point I even ported OpenWRT to my unsupported tplink device. IIRC I hacked together a devicetree and made some small modifications to the tplink loader code.
Funnily enough when I made a PR on github it was basically ignored after I implemented the feedback. I proceed to instead send the patch to the mailinglist and it was merged the same day without comment. That must be some kind of skill filter...
However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.
So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.
Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)
If the wealth tax rate is close to zero, who the hell cares?
The wealth tax in e.g. Kanton Zürich is 0.025% (not the cheapest Kanton).
If you are able to grow your capital at - say - inflation corrected 4%, which shouldn't be overly hard, and you pay no taxes whatsoever on cap gains while paying 0.025% on the total accumulated wealth.
I'll let you do the math as to how good you have it there.
If you now earn 4% on your capital and pay 0.9% wealth taxes that is like a 25% tax rate on your unrealized gains. Inflation is close to zero anyway and interest rates are negative.
Obviously I prefer that system because we can compound essentially tax free to a couple of 100k before having to think about taxes.