That article is still fairly good of a read, with a couple things slightly out of date, which I will note here simply for pedantry or anyone interested.
BSD no longer uses CVS; FreeBSD specifically has moved to SVN for their primary revision control system, and CVS and related tools (such as csup) are deprecated and in some cases disabled. Along with that, linux kernel is now in git, not bitkeeper.
While source is still the "base" method of installing and updating a FreeBSD system, and it will certainly always be available; now, binary base system and add-on utilities are becoming more popular. Specifically, `freebsd-update` can be used to update the base system's binaries and source. `pkg-ng` adds `apt-get` like binary package management.
ZFS is definitely one of the major things that has FreeBSD on all of my systems. I even run ZFS on single drive laptops:
pool: zroot
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
zroot ONLINE 0 0 0
ada0p3 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
I run btrfs on my main arch installation. Have for ~6 months. If you get the fsck.btrfs tool (it is upstream) you eliminiate the only real showstopper with btrfs on Linux.
You get the online compression (meaning you use less space and read and write faster on mechanical storage because you have less to read / write at a time), you get the snapshots, you get subvolumes, checksums, etc.
I follow the btrfs development because I'd love to have at least the features of ZFS on Linux. However I would not dare (yet) to use it as a replacement for my current home fileserver (which owns ALL my data).
I'm amazed at how generally unreliable drives are at retrieving stored data with ZFS checksums in place to highlight the problem - it seems that on average every TB of storages has a problem with a block every half-year or so.
BSD no longer uses CVS; FreeBSD specifically has moved to SVN for their primary revision control system, and CVS and related tools (such as csup) are deprecated and in some cases disabled. Along with that, linux kernel is now in git, not bitkeeper.
While source is still the "base" method of installing and updating a FreeBSD system, and it will certainly always be available; now, binary base system and add-on utilities are becoming more popular. Specifically, `freebsd-update` can be used to update the base system's binaries and source. `pkg-ng` adds `apt-get` like binary package management.
ZFS is definitely one of the major things that has FreeBSD on all of my systems. I even run ZFS on single drive laptops: