Great news! BTRFS was introduced in the mainline kernel in March 2009! It's been ten years.
I never do a separate home partition though, so I ended up with the entire disk in Btrfs. I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have when setting up partitions during installation, and didn't totally understand the implications of using Btrfs back then.
Eventually though, it filled up my entire drive with snapshots, causing me much confusion and many disk full errors until I could figure out what had happened.
That experience turned me off from openSUSE for several years, until I finally started using it (with a more conservative choice of Ext4) again for a few machines a couple years ago.
If you're on lvm, you're still getting snapshots now, even with ext4.
That said, I'm going to continue to opt for Ext4 or XFS for the time being, even on distros where Btrfs is the default. Probably in a few years I'll get around to upgrading to Btrfs.
- don't use it because you think the name is "cool". Every time I go to a linux meetup, some idiot starts talking about the name.
- it takes 5-10 years for a filesystem or database to mature after it's released. Otherwise you will lose data and cry.
- the recent BTRFS performance improvements are against itself, not other filesystems. EXT4 is an excellent fs, as good as XFS performance-wise overall.
Source: DBA and storage engineer.