this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024

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Btrfs should've been Wayland (self.linux)

submitted 8 hours ago by possiblylinux127 to c/[email protected]

51 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] 7 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours 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 4 hours ago (3 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] 3 points 1 hour ago

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] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] possiblylinux127 1 points 4 hours 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] 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

@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.

[–] possiblylinux127 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I think most people aren't living in the past. What is your use case exactly? What do you need a remote GUI for? RDP and other protocols exist and are much better especially in terms of performance.

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

@possiblylinux127 Again rdp, vnc, x2go, ONLY work for full desktops, they do not work for individual applications. If I've got a terminal session into a server and decide I want to fire up synaptic, X does that for me, Wayland doesn't and the overhead of starting an entire desktop to run a single app for a few minutes does not make sense.

[–] possiblylinux127 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

And there is were the community has kind diverged. Now days it is either headless servers or desktops.

Running individual apps is interesting but I am afraid that it is not super practical in 2024. However, there is this: https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

Xorg is no longer being maintained for the most part and because the code base is so large there isn't anyone who understands the codebase. I still use it for my semi virtual PC as Xorg allows for a lot more flexibility than Wayland plus Xfce4 isn't completely ported yet. There will be a day when I move completely though. Probably when Xfce4 is Wayland native.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

I mean there is waypipe now ...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours 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] 1 points 1 hour 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] 1 points 1 hour 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] 3 points 3 hours 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] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours 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] 1 points 2 hours 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.

[–] possiblylinux127 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours 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] 9 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 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] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 44 minutes ago (1 children)

@lancalot none of the "main" distros default to BTRFS, just "derivatives" default to BTRFS, Garuda is based on Arch, so it's normal that it's one of the rising new distros, Garuda rose because gaming on Linux received a huge boost from sources like Valve so I doubt that it (Garuda) will deviate from its path with time, plus, they provide multiple flavors for multiple purposes, gaming requires stability & sometimes a rollback mechanism, that's where BTRFS shine, not so much stability BTW

[–] [email protected] 1 points 39 minutes ago

none of the “main” distros default to BTRFS, just “derivatives” default to BTRFS

So you don't regard Fedora (or openSUSE) as "main" distro?

[–] possiblylinux127 3 points 4 hours 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] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

@lancalot @possiblylinux127 I tried it once, it pissed itself and corrupted the entire file system to the point where I couldn't recover, went back to ext4. Had similar experience with xfs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

waypipe?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 3 hours 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 3 hours 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 3 hours ago

Firefox is not a game?

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

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).

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

@hummus273 Xvnc does not allow you to display individual applications only an entire desktop. I'm monitoring about 20 different computers doing different things and for me it is a significant advantage not to have to bring up a whole desktop but to be able to launch a single graphical application on my existing desktop.

I don't really understand the degree of emotional attachment people have to one solution or another. For me it's a simple application case, for me Wayland is not desirable, not only does it not network, but the embedded X-server as part of the kernel works very effectively by avoiding the kernel/userland switches an ordinary X server would require.

So for my use case, Wayland is NOT a replacement and so I have to object to people arguing that it is a full replacement for X, it is not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

@hummus273 Xvnc does not allow you to display individual applications only an entire desktop. I'm monitoring about 20 different computers doing different things and for me it is a significant advantage not to have to bring up a whole desktop but to be able to launch a single graphical application on my existing desktop.

Yes, that is what I meant with not as convenient.

I don't really understand the degree of emotional attachment people have to one solution or another. For me it's a simple application case, for me Wayland is not desirable, not only does it not network

Your use case is covered by waypipe (which in my tests is much more responsive than X11 forwarding).

the embedded X-server as part of the kernel works very effectively by avoiding the kernel/userland switches an ordinary X server would require.

I think you are confusing stuff here. Which kernel has an embedded X server?

So for my use case, Wayland is NOT a replacement and so I have to object to people arguing that it is a full replacement for X, it is not.

What part of your use case is not covered by waypipe?

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

@hummus273 Waypipe would involve a lot of userland / kernel exchanges avoided by using the kernel based mode setting Xserver. It happens to work well with my hardware. And I don't see any noticeable latency issues and not all apps work with Wayland hence I have no motivation to change to Wayland and every motivation to avoid it. Sorry if that gets someone's panties in a wad.

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

Waypipe has nothing to do with the kernel mode setting driver. The X server code does not run in the kernel. Wayland compositors use kernel modesetting for mode changes, so not sure what your point is? Not saying you need to switch to Wayland, just saying that it covers the use case you described as impossible with Wayland.

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

@hummus273 Yes actually in my case it does. The kernel has an X-server built in but ONLY for Intel graphics and I happen to have Intel graphics. Sorry if you're not familiar enough with X or the kernel to know that but that is a fact.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

If that is the case, then you can probably easily find the X server code in the Linux kernel and send a link? Spoiler: it is not there

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

@hummus273 I am mistaken, it is only the mode setting for the X-server that is handled in the kernel. At any rate it works well for my needs.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 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 7 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours 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] 1 points 3 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 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.

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