this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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Btrfs should've been Wayland (self.linux)
submitted 4 hours ago by possiblylinux127 to c/[email protected]
23 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] 0 points 57 minutes ago* (last edited 57 minutes 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".

[–] possiblylinux127 1 points 46 minutes ago (1 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] 1 points 42 minutes ago (1 children)

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

[–] possiblylinux127 1 points 34 minutes 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] 1 points 31 minutes ago

@possiblylinux127 Yes idiots keep touting it as a replacement for Xorg which IS a networking display and that is a feature I need, and I suspect if more people knew how to use it they'd also need it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 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] 1 points 12 minutes ago

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

[–] possiblylinux127 2 points 1 hour ago

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] 1 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 27 minutes 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] 1 points 22 minutes 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] 1 points 17 minutes 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] 1 points 14 minutes 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 minutes ago

Firefox is not a game?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 25 minutes ago (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 minutes ago

You assume I'm not using it. On the contrary, I use it a lot at work. We have some old TK interfaces. They take ages to load over the network. The interfaces load much faster when using Xvnc running on the remote machine rather than X forwarding (but it is not as convenient).

[–] possiblylinux127 0 points 3 hours 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] 0 points 3 hours 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.

[–] possiblylinux127 3 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour 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] 1 points 4 hours ago (2 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.

[–] possiblylinux127 2 points 3 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 hours ago

@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.