this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024

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Btrfs should've been Wayland (lemmy.zip)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

81 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I think the problem with btrfs is that it entered the spotlight way to early. With Wayland there was time to work on a lot of the kinks before everyone started seriously switching.

On btrfs a bunch of people switched blindly and then lost data. This caused many to have a bad impression of btrfs. These days it is significantly better but because there was so much fear there is less attention paid to it and it is less widely used.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

Both Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs. That's all the praise it needs really.

With Bcachefs still being relatively immature and the situation surrounding (Open)ZFS unchanged, Btrfs is the only CoW-viable option we got. So people will definitely find it, if they need it. Which is where the actual issue is; why would someone for which ext4 has worked splendidly so far, even consider switching? It's the age-old discussion in which peeps simply like to stick to what already works.

Tbh, if only Debian would default to Btrfs, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You are welcome to start a movement to get Debian to switch. You will be swimming up stream but you are welcome to try. Debian has been the same for decades and people like that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You didn't get my point. Btrfs is one OG distro removed from being THE standard. It's doing a lot better than you're making it out to be.

It's not like Btrfs is dunking on all other file systems and Debian is being unreasonable by defaulting to ext4. Instead, Btrfs wins some of its battles and loses others. It's pretty competent overall, but ext4 (and other competing file systems) have their respective merits.

Thankfully, we got competing standards that are well-tested. We should celebrate this diversity instead of advocating for monocultures.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (9 children)

@lancalot @possiblylinux127 eh, also Garuda defaults to BTRFS, EOS does not default to BTRFS, but it has an option on their Calamares

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

tbh the situation with Wayland was not too different, and wouldn't have been better. Compared to Wayland, brtfs dodged a bullet. Overhyped, oversold, overcrowdsourced, literally years behind the system it was supposed to "replace" when it was thrown into production. To this day, wayland can't even complete a full desktop session login on my machine.

So, if you ask me, btrfs should *definitively not * have been Wayland! Can you imagine if btrfs had launched on Fedora, and then you formatted your partition as btrfs to install Linux, but the installer could not install into it? "brtfs reports a writer is not available", says the installer. You go to the forums to ask what's going on, why the brtfs does not work. The devs of brtfs respond with "oh it's just a protocol; everyone who wants to write files into our new partition format have to implement a writer themselves".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Clearly you have had some bad experiences

Maybe you shouldn't take your experience from 5 years ago and apply now. Wayland is solid and so is Btrfs. I know that because people use both.

I was mostly curious about btrfs with raid 1 on Proxmox but my doubts have been answered.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Except: I try Wayland every 6 months or so and still have problems with it.

Wayland's problem isn't Wayland; it's all of the stuff that needs to work in Wayland that doesn't. Using Wayland, to me, feels like using Windows, out a Mac: as long as you don't stray out of the playground, it's mostly fine (if a bit slow). As soon as you try to do any outside-the-box setup, like changing the status bar, things start getting all f'ed up. Like, last time I tried, I couldn't get DPI font scaling to work - fonts would either be too small everywhere, or big in most apps but really tiny in the status bar. Whenever I encounter things like this, I search for solutions for, maybe an hour, see that other people have the same problem and there's no fix yet, and bail back to X11, which Just Works.

Also, while I know some people have had bad experiences with btrfs, I've been using it for years. I originally switched because I had multiple separate cases of data loss using ext4, across different systems. It's always baffled me that folks complain about btrfs, but ext4 was far less reliably. IME.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I have had the opposite experience from you with wayland and btrfs. Recent data loss with btrfs but perfect functionality with Wayland (on KDE and Arch Linux). Moving panels just works. Fractional scaling just works (though i do miss the old method where smaller screens just got supersampled instead of the way they do it now).

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Maybe you shouldn't take your experience from 5 years ago and apply now. Wayland is solid and so is Btrfs.

My 2 year old AMD-based laptop begs to differ. X11 is rock-solid, whereas Wayland locks up completely on a regular basis, without producing any useful logging. Every so often I try it to see if things have gotten better, but until today unfortunately not. Personally I prefer X11, I need to perform work on my Linux machine, not spend time debugging a faulty compositor, protocol or wherever the problem lies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Wayland itself can't crash, it's just a set of protocol specs. The implementation you're using (gnome/KDE/wlroots...) does. Obviously this doesn't solve your problem as an end-user, just saying that this particular issue isn't to blame on Wayland in itself.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Fine, in that case both Gnome and KDE handle the Wayland protocol in a crappy manner on my hardware. As the end-user I don't care: I have no issues with KDE and Gnome on X11, when using the Wayland protocol they are unstable. For my use-case X11 is the better choice , as using the Wayland protocol comes with issues and does not provide any benefits over X11.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

@Aganim @loutr This makes sense, these people that have some irrational emotion attachment to Wayland in spite of it's lack of functionality, do not. Now, if they have a use case that makes sense to them, they're playing a game that needs 200fps, then fine, but if the use case doesn't fit then don't use it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This feels more like long time Linux guy digging in there heals because they like the old days

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

@possiblylinux127 @loutr I like to get work done, some tools are helpful to that end, Rust for example, superior to C in as much as it makes it much more difficult to make mistakes with memory allocation without resorting to the grossness of garbage collection, but when new things only detract from work flow, then yea I prefer the older things that work. When new things benefit it, Rust for example, or the latest kernels in terms of efficiency, then I use them. I don't like change for changes sake, I like change when it improves things, in my use case, Wayland does not do that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This sounds like a driver issue or something if all desktops are breaking for you. Have you tried reporting it anywhere?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

The problem is, I wouldn't know what to report and where. I've never been able to find any relevant logging, neither in /var/log nor in journalctl. I doubt opening an issue with 'desktop locks up randomly when using Wayland' is really useful without any logging. And where would I do that? At the Wayland bug tracker? Gnome or KDE? Kernel, as it indeed might be a driver issue? And there is of course the time component: I use my laptop for work, so I simply cannnot spend hours on debugging this. That's time I don't have, I'm afraid.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@possiblylinux127 @lambalicious Wayland may be solid as a local display manager but it does not network.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It is a protocol not a display manager. The desktop runs everything and the apps connect to it.

Network was never part of the design and never will be

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Btrfs was solid for me some 11 years ago, Wayland still wasn't solid as of yesterday.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Wayland didn't work out networking, even to this day, which is why I'm still using Xorg.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Wayland as a protocol that apps use to talk to the desktop. It doesn't use network at all really.

You need something like freeRDP for network access.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

@possiblylinux127 It is touted as a replacement for X-windows but the PRIMARY ADVANTAGE of X-windows is that you can run a program on one machine and display it on anther making Wayland completely useless in a networked context.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It is not trying to be a one to one replacement. It is a totally different thing. You are wanting a motorcycle to replace your 2002 pickup truck.

Also X forwarding is broken for most stuff. It probably will work but it will run poorly and use lots of bandwidth. This is because there are layers and layers of work arounds to make modern hardware and software work on it. The X protocol was intended for mainframes in the 80's. It should've died long ago.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

@possiblylinux127 It strikes me as weird someone down votes a simple statement of fact. I guess they have a problem with reality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

waypipe?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

X's network transparency is overrated IMHO. Since ages most data on desktops is sent via shared memory to the X server (MIT-SHM extension) otherwise the performance would suck. This does not work over the network and so X over the network is actually quite slow. Waypipe works way better for me than SSH X forwarding.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (8 children)

@hummus273 It's overrated because you don't use it, I frequently do. If all you want to do is emulate Windows than Wayland is fine. If you need network functionality it is not.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@hummus273 I have a 1gbit network connection at the co-lo, and 180mb/s cable and I don't have any lag using X tunneled through ssh.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not having any lag is physically impossible. You don't notice it maybe. But if I open Firefox with X forwarding on the same network (1gbe) it is very noticeable for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@hummus273 Perhaps not because I'm not trying to game, and I can't detect any changes faster than about 1/50th of a second anyway so fps faster than 50 is more or less moot for me.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Stop spreading disinformation (again). Wayland was a fucking mess and caused countless of issues, especially in a lot of "edge cases". Meanwhile, dumbos were spreading lies about how it runs perfect and without issues while I kept switching back to X after merely minutes to hours whenever I tried to use Wayland again. It's just bullshit that never was grounded in reality. Even now there's games & applications who don't run with Wayland, and likely never will since they have zero incentive to do so or aren't even in active development anymore and that stupid X11 bridge still is required to run in the background for a lot of them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I think you might be missing the part where wayland WAS running perfectly for them. It still does for me. I am actively and happily using Wayland and everything for me works. XWayland is a fantastic stopgap for now.

Wine is (slowly) getting a native Wayland port, which will translate to Proton eventually.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I think the main difference is that while a graphical session can work through some issurs, a file system is not allowed to fail under any circumstances. The bar is way higher and stability a lot more important.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (7 children)

With Wayland there was time to work on a lot of the kinks before everyone started seriously switching.

Not if you were using Ubuntu in 2017 when they switched to Weston as the default display server for 17.10 and lots of people suffered a great deal from how half-baked the project was at the time. For me personally, the 17.10 upgrade failed to start the display server and I ended up reinstalling completely, then in 18.04 they set the default back to XOrg and that upgrade also failed for me, resulting in another reinstall.

I have no doubt that this single decision was responsible for a large amount of the Wayland scepticism that followed.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

People pretend Ubuntu is this great thing but in reality it hasn't been great in 15 years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

@possiblylinux127 @drspod Expect a comment like this from Lemmy, bet you're running Windows 11, I've got servers running Ubuntu 24.04, 22.04, 20.04, Debian Bookworm, Mint, MxLinux, Zorin, Fedora, Alma, Rocky, and Manjaro, the Ubuntu machines consistently give me less headaches even though I do have to purge them of snapd.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Out of all distros I've tried over the years, Ubuntu has always been the buggiest by far.

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