I’m kinda familiar with that rabbit hole :P . Though, I didn’t quite consider your 3rd and 4th methods. So kudos to you for that!

While writing up a draft, I actually stumbled upon an (unfinished) article that goes over this subject in way more depth than I could.

Though, the author doesn’t mention NovaCustom that intends to combine Boot Guard, Heads and QubesOS certification on their devices.

You didn’t get my point. Btrfs is one OG distro removed from being THE standard. It’s doing a lot better than you’re making it out to be.

It’s not like Btrfs is dunking on all other file systems and Debian is being unreasonable by defaulting to ext4. Instead, Btrfs wins some of its battles and loses others. It’s pretty competent overall, but ext4 (and other competing file systems) have their respective merits.

Thankfully, we got competing standards that are well-tested. We should celebrate this diversity instead of advocating for monocultures.

Both Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs. That’s all the praise it needs really.

With Bcachefs still being relatively immature and the situation surrounding (Open)ZFS unchanged, Btrfs is the only CoW-viable option we got. So people will definitely find it, if they need it. Which is where the actual issue is; why would someone for which ext4 has worked splendidly so far, even consider switching? It’s the age-old discussion in which peeps simply like to stick to what already works.

Tbh, if only Debian would default to Btrfs, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.