FreeBSD Community Survey Confirms ZFS Is Their Most Valued Server Feature

The FreeBSD Foundation has published the results of the FreeBSD Community Survey that reveal interesting insights about FreeBSD usage and its users.

This year's FreeBSD Community Survey shows that 76% of FreeBSD server users say ZFS is their most crucial workload attribute. ZFS was the most valued server workload attribute among the FreeBSD users polled while coming in second was security patches. The survey showed most of the FreeBSD server workloads running were in the area of storage and web servers, to little surprise.

With FreeBSD supporting (Open)ZFS out-of-the-box and encouraging it for root file-systems and all around having nice integrated ZFS support, it's no real surprise that many users running FreeBSD are interested in it and a driving factor compared to the out-of-tree / non-mainline support for OpenZFS on Linux and other platforms. The integral level of FreeBSD + ZFS integration is the primary advantage for this BSD operating system over the likes of Linux or other BSDs.

The FreeBSD Community Survey also showed that Lenovo systems are by far the most popular brand for FreeBSD on laptops while Dell was a distant second.

The FreeBSD Community Survey 2024 results in full can be found via FreeBSDFoundation.org.