Linux @lemmy.world Possibly linux @lemmy.zip 6d ago

Btrfs should've been Wayland

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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I just think people who have issues with Wayland and btrfs are hitting bugs that developers can't trigger. It's an unfortunate situation but these people should work closer with developers to get them more info.

The situation sucks because Wayland and btrfs offer so many features but there's those few people who can't seem to get them to work reliably.
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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- what ZFS situation?
  
  I'll keep it brief. But it comes down to the fact that, out of the more popular distros, it's only officially supported on Ubuntu.
- @lancalot @possiblylinux127 eh, also Garuda defaults to BTRFS, EOS does not default to BTRFS, but it has an option on their Calamares
  
  I wanted to stick to (what I'd refer to as) OG distros; so independent distros that have kept their relevance over a long period of time.
  
  But you're correct, Garuda Linux and others default to Btrfs as well. At this point, I'd argue it's the most sensible option if snapshot functionality is desired from Snapper/Timeshift.
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".
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  @possiblylinux127 @lambalicious Wayland may be solid as a local display manager but it does not network.
  
  Btrfs was solid for me some 11 years ago, Wayland still wasn't solid as of yesterday.
  
  Fam, my experience was one (1) (uno) year ago. And during those five years Wayland made zero progress by itself - it was everyone else who had to do the job of Wayland for free.
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.
Wayland didn't work out networking, even to this day, which is why I'm still using Xorg.
- waypipe?
- 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.
  
  @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.
  
  @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.
- 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.
  
  @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.
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.
- Not if you were using Ubuntu in 2017 when they switched to Weston as the default display server for 17.10
  
  Do you have any source on Ubuntu using Weston as its default? As far as I know Ubuntu has always been GNOME, which doesn’t use Weston.
  
  I stated the version number (17.10), the release notes are here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes
- People pretend Ubuntu is this great thing but in reality it hasn't been great in 15 years.
  
  @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.
  
  Out of all distros I've tried over the years, Ubuntu has always been the buggiest by far.
- @drspod @possiblylinux127 Since I am using Intel graphics and there is an Xorg X server baked into the Linux kernel for Intel graphics, I switched to it at that time and have been using it ever since.
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.
- 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.
- I had to switch to X after upgrading my system because it was all choppy on Wayland. I spent a few hours trying to figure out why and then I said fuck it, X still works. Wayland still is an unfinished mess.
- Don't use Wayland I guess

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