Yes. Much faster. Especially for HDDs. But at a cost of a lot of RAM. Also lz4 compression can speed up your HDDs up to 10x (!) to read and 3x to write. [1, see "To compress, or not to compress, that is the question" section.] But it's going to have a considerably higher CPU usage as well.

[1]: https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html

I've used both Btrfs and Zfs as Linux root filesystems and at the time I tested (about 4-5 years ago) Btrfs had much worse performance. I've heard that Btrfs greatly improved performance on recent kernels though.

What bothers me about Zfs is that it uses a different caching mechanism (ARC) than Linux page cache. With ARC you actually see the memory used in tools like htop and gnome system monitor (it is not cool seeing half your memory being used when no programs are running). ARC is supposed to release memory when needed (never tested though), so it might not be an issue.

After about an year of playing with both filesystems on my Linux laptop, I decided the checksumming is not worth the performance loss and switched back to ext4, which is significantly faster than both filesystems. Still use ZFS on backup drives for checksumming data at rest and easy incremental replication with `zfs send`.