this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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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] 4 points 1 day 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] 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (25 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".

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (14 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] 3 points 2 days 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] 4 points 2 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

It sounds like btrfs is solid most of the time and will explode for like 1 and a thousand cases.

A few years ago left my Fedora machine at home and left for a few days on a trip. When I got back the device was powered off and when I powered it on it said no boot device. When I booted off of a USB the drive showed as unknown with no formating to speak of.

I was able to recover it and the btrfs partition as apparently the GPT table had been overwritten. To this day I have no idea what went wrong. Btrfs in general is very solid in my experience and I use it for USB devices and my Fedora machines. I have never had a issue outside if that one time it died.

Btrfs is the filesystem that is cool but also potentially explosive. I think it has a huge amount of potential and I am very tempted to move my Proxmox machines over since it doesn't have the same limitations of ZFS

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days 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 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Don't use Wayland I guess

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (21 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (5 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] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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

I stated the version number (17.10), the release notes are here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes

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