They just made it the default in fedora. It is likely not deprecated for unreleased RHEL versions

I just installed Fedora yesterday and was pretty confused at that part, after reading many articles and posts about RH dropping btrfs.

Fedora is a community distribution despite what many think. It is not controlled by RH in any way.

"Fedora is developed and sponsored by Fedora Project and Red Hat."

https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/linux/fedora-vs-red-hat-ent...

Both of you are right. Red Hat pays for Fedora in a lot of ways, but does not control it. There are obviously a lot of personal and professional relationships that gives Red Hat influence over Fedora, but the purse strings are never used to control it.

*deprecated

On the other hand isn’t btrfs becoming the default in Fedora 33, thus eventually making a comeback in RHEL?

Yes that may well happen.

It's also noteworthy that the BTRFS change was driven by community members, mainly from Facebook.

We use it as the default at SUSE. In SLES and openSUSE.

If you want to use btrfs on RHEL8, you still can: go to https://elrepo.org/ and install elrepo-release, then install kernel-ml from their -kernel repo and btrfs-progs from their -testing repo.

... at which point you lose the support you're paying for from Red Hat, thus defeating the purpose of using RHEL in the first place.

So if you want to use Btrfs, you might as well use it on something besides RHEL.

Running an unsupported kernel doesn't mean that support won't help you at all. It just means they won't help you with kernel-related issues. There's still a lot of value in support for the rest of the system.

I have heard that they will still try to help you, they just won't guarantee it works on btrfs.