I found a GitHub issue suggesting that they warn users about the risks associated with native encryption, it has helped me understand the situation better: https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/494

Those caveats/issues are definitely worrying. I don’t think I have enough expertise to comment on them, unfortunately.

The wiki also says that native encryption is “unofficially discouraged by the community” and I’d be interested in learning more about that, but there’s no source for that statement.

If you’re interested in ZFS, I think it’s definitely worth trying out on a secondary machine. There’s a lot to learn, but I’ve found it worthwhile.

I’ve been using ZFS for the past 3 years without any major issues. For my server, all my media is stored on a group of HDDs in an external HDD enclosure using RAIDz2. I currently use Proxmox, since I wanted a stable OS and it has support for ZFS baked-in.

My personal laptop has root on ZFS, running Arch. ZFS is a kernel module installed separately in this case. Since Arch is a rolling distro and I like messing around with it, I appreciate running a FS with snapshots where I can easily rollback when something breaks. Plus, ZFS supports native encryption!

Awesome! Just updated without issues, I only had to make one tiny change to my config.