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"btrfs isn’t there yet, but will be awesome when it is." So awesome that Red Hat Linux even deprecated it. "Its laptop support leaves something to be desired.

"btrfs isn’t there yet, but will be awesome when it is." So awesome that Red Hat Linux even deprecated it. "Its laptop support leaves something to be desired. I installed it on a few-years-old Thinkpad — basically the best possible platform for working suspend in a Free OS. It has worked perfectly out of the box in Debian for years." Perfect as in "everything except certain common features and expected annoyances" like suspend/resume et al. But this year is the year you know... Does anyone even fall for these Linux rants ?

calpaterson 9y ago
I use Debian on desktop and laptop all day every day and have not had a problem with suspend and resume in at least the last 5 years. At this point, it seems to work at least as well as Windows and Mac (perhaps better - I've seen a few Windows users having suspend problems).
- pksadiq 9y ago
  I recommend every person who buy a hardware for GNU/Linux to buy one that runs well out of the box with Debian main. It is a hard requirement I suggest to my friends. May be they run Ubuntu/Fedora, but if it runs well with Debian or linux-libre, rest assured, it should work with any Distribution. I haven't yet seen much Laptops of notebooks to recommend though. https://h-node.org/ https://h-node.org/ seems to be the only good reference.
- HugoDaniel 9y ago
  Wifi comes up ? VPN reconnects ? USB's and Card readers stay mounted ? Audio mixer volume stays the same ? Youtube videos and music player resumes ? uptime shows the correct information ? All of this out of the box in 2015 ? That must have been the year of linux on the desktop.
  - calpaterson 9y ago
    Yes all of it. I'm on a thinkpad T450, running Debian oldstable (jessie) which was frozen for release in late 2014.
- jmiserez 9y ago
  Suspend-to-disk too?
  - calpaterson 9y ago
    I don't really do that much so I don't know. It only really happens in laptops when battery is running low while suspended and then something seems to wake the laptop and then hibernate it. Cool trick. No idea how it works though.
  - vetinari 9y ago
    Does anyone really use suspend-to-disk? It takes awfully long to write 8-16 GB of data, then awfully long to read it back. It is much faster to just boot, than to restore from suspend to disk.
    - HugoDaniel 9y ago
      If the battery level is at the end the OS should suspend to disk in order to avoid losing work.
    - imhoguy 9y ago
      Hybrid-suspend should help avoid read it back from disk if AC or battery power is uninterrupted. Also I find caches dropping benefitting to reduce the suspend time.
    - jmiserez 9y ago
      Yes, that is my experience too on Linux. However, most times it isn’t actually necessary to write the full RAM out and IIRC Windows and macOS actually don’t. There are a few approaches that work, e.g. you can do memory ballooning and drop caches to reduce memory usage before suspending. In addition, you can write unused RAM pages to disk during normal operation, so that when the user wants to suspend, most of the pages are already on disk.
- yaantc 9y ago
  I have Debian Stretch running on a 3rd gen Thinkpad X1, and had some problems. It took about a year for suspend/resume to work reliably, before I had random lock-ups on resume. It turned out to be a bug in the early MMU code, and once it was fixed I had a very stable experience. This bug was hard to reproduce: on other Thinkpads in my company nobody had the issue, but with a slightly different environment (TP models, Ubuntu not Debian and different kernel versions). More recently I had a regression for a few months, until the issue was identified (and fixed). Both experiences made me more sensitive to Linux stability issues. If you look for it, you will find many bug reports. They typically are rather frustrating: they happen for some unlucky guy, but are hard or impossible to reproduce in slightly different contexts. I guess this can't really be avoided: both Linux and a modern PC are complex systems, and there are many variants. And no ODM doing integration tests (or not with your preferred distro of PC configuration). So some glitches are bound to happen. Considering the lack of ODM support and standardization, the situation is actually quite good. But there are bound to be glitches here and there. For those who want to avoid it, it's possible to avoid all this by getting a PC with Linux pre-installed, or with some integration test done (it seems to me there's some work done by Canonical for Ubuntu on some Thinkpad models, but not sure...). Also, not jumping on brand new laptop models can help too. As for me, I prefer to stick with Debian on my laptop of choice, and handle the rare odd glitch when it happens. It's ok. Still, when I'll buy my next laptop I'll wait for the new generation to arrive, and buy the previous one. Cheaper, more stable with Linux, and not much hardware differences anyway nowadays.
  - Jonnax 9y ago
    Dell officially supports Ubuntu and sells laptops with it on their store. I've not had any issues with my XPS 13 on it.
    - pksadiq 9y ago
      > Dell officially supports Ubuntu... Meh. I'm writing this from an Asus EeePC which was once officially supported by Ubuntu, but now with broken graphics and wifi. The non-free graphics driver is not included in Ubuntu anymore and the wifi works only with non-free binary blob. Also, I recently found that wifi doesn't support channel 13 and 14 (found it accidentally when my laptop wasn't seeing the nearby hotspot) with the non-free blob. Now I run Debian testing. Don't trust in those "Officially supported" things, unless it's Debian GNU/Linux. Otherwise, it's eventually going to be broken.
trisimix 9y ago
This is a bsd rant not linux
- HugoDaniel 9y ago
  Is it ? "There is nothing like Dropbox for FreeBSD. Apparently this is because FreeBSD has nothing like Linux’s inotify. " Kind of gave it away for me.
  - pbalau 9y ago
    Facebook's watchman uses inotify and I made it build and run on FreeBSD 11 2 days ago. Still need to fix some scripts and I will try to submit it to the ports tree
vetinari 9y ago
Of course Redhat deprecated btrfs support, they are betting on XFS and Stratis. No need to throw resources on competing project, the others in Linux community will carry on. > Perfect as in "everything except certain common features and expected annoyances" like suspend/resume et al. I don't think you read that part carefully with proper understanding. The author said, that these annoyances were when running FreeBSD, and that in Debian it doesn't have them.
cyphar 9y ago
> So awesome that Red Hat Linux even deprecated it. They never "supported" it in the strict meaning of the word, it was only a technical preview and they dropped it from technical preview. That's different from "deprecated" (let alone that Red Hat doesn't have the power to deprecate things in upstream Linux). Not to mention that most/all of Red Hat's btrfs engineers moved to other companies (like Facebook) so nobody was there to maintain it. The more forward-thinking reason for dropping it is that Red Hat is putting all their eggs into devicemapper+XFS (in the form of "Stratis"[1]), so why would they expend engineering resources on more projects than necessary -- especially when they'll probably want customers to switch to Stratis rather than keep them on a never-actually-supported-by-them filesystem. [1]: https://github.com/stratis-storage https://github.com/stratis-storage

calpaterson 9y ago

I use Debian on desktop and laptop all day every day and have not had a problem with suspend and resume in at least the last 5 years. At this point, it seems to work at least as well as Windows and Mac (perhaps better - I've seen a few Windows users having suspend problems).

pksadiq 9y ago
I recommend every person who buy a hardware for GNU/Linux to buy one that runs well out of the box with Debian main. It is a hard requirement I suggest to my friends. May be they run Ubuntu/Fedora, but if it runs well with Debian or linux-libre, rest assured, it should work with any Distribution. I haven't yet seen much Laptops of notebooks to recommend though. https://h-node.org/ https://h-node.org/ seems to be the only good reference.
HugoDaniel 9y ago
Wifi comes up ? VPN reconnects ? USB's and Card readers stay mounted ? Audio mixer volume stays the same ? Youtube videos and music player resumes ? uptime shows the correct information ? All of this out of the box in 2015 ? That must have been the year of linux on the desktop.
- calpaterson 9y ago
  Yes all of it. I'm on a thinkpad T450, running Debian oldstable (jessie) which was frozen for release in late 2014.
jmiserez 9y ago
Suspend-to-disk too?
- calpaterson 9y ago
  I don't really do that much so I don't know. It only really happens in laptops when battery is running low while suspended and then something seems to wake the laptop and then hibernate it. Cool trick. No idea how it works though.
- vetinari 9y ago
  Does anyone really use suspend-to-disk? It takes awfully long to write 8-16 GB of data, then awfully long to read it back. It is much faster to just boot, than to restore from suspend to disk.
  - HugoDaniel 9y ago
    If the battery level is at the end the OS should suspend to disk in order to avoid losing work.
  - imhoguy 9y ago
    Hybrid-suspend should help avoid read it back from disk if AC or battery power is uninterrupted. Also I find caches dropping benefitting to reduce the suspend time.
  - jmiserez 9y ago
    Yes, that is my experience too on Linux. However, most times it isn’t actually necessary to write the full RAM out and IIRC Windows and macOS actually don’t. There are a few approaches that work, e.g. you can do memory ballooning and drop caches to reduce memory usage before suspending. In addition, you can write unused RAM pages to disk during normal operation, so that when the user wants to suspend, most of the pages are already on disk.
yaantc 9y ago
I have Debian Stretch running on a 3rd gen Thinkpad X1, and had some problems. It took about a year for suspend/resume to work reliably, before I had random lock-ups on resume. It turned out to be a bug in the early MMU code, and once it was fixed I had a very stable experience. This bug was hard to reproduce: on other Thinkpads in my company nobody had the issue, but with a slightly different environment (TP models, Ubuntu not Debian and different kernel versions). More recently I had a regression for a few months, until the issue was identified (and fixed). Both experiences made me more sensitive to Linux stability issues. If you look for it, you will find many bug reports. They typically are rather frustrating: they happen for some unlucky guy, but are hard or impossible to reproduce in slightly different contexts. I guess this can't really be avoided: both Linux and a modern PC are complex systems, and there are many variants. And no ODM doing integration tests (or not with your preferred distro of PC configuration). So some glitches are bound to happen. Considering the lack of ODM support and standardization, the situation is actually quite good. But there are bound to be glitches here and there. For those who want to avoid it, it's possible to avoid all this by getting a PC with Linux pre-installed, or with some integration test done (it seems to me there's some work done by Canonical for Ubuntu on some Thinkpad models, but not sure...). Also, not jumping on brand new laptop models can help too. As for me, I prefer to stick with Debian on my laptop of choice, and handle the rare odd glitch when it happens. It's ok. Still, when I'll buy my next laptop I'll wait for the new generation to arrive, and buy the previous one. Cheaper, more stable with Linux, and not much hardware differences anyway nowadays.
- Jonnax 9y ago
  Dell officially supports Ubuntu and sells laptops with it on their store. I've not had any issues with my XPS 13 on it.
  - pksadiq 9y ago
    > Dell officially supports Ubuntu... Meh. I'm writing this from an Asus EeePC which was once officially supported by Ubuntu, but now with broken graphics and wifi. The non-free graphics driver is not included in Ubuntu anymore and the wifi works only with non-free binary blob. Also, I recently found that wifi doesn't support channel 13 and 14 (found it accidentally when my laptop wasn't seeing the nearby hotspot) with the non-free blob. Now I run Debian testing. Don't trust in those "Officially supported" things, unless it's Debian GNU/Linux. Otherwise, it's eventually going to be broken.

trisimix 9y ago

This is a bsd rant not linux

HugoDaniel 9y ago
Is it ? "There is nothing like Dropbox for FreeBSD. Apparently this is because FreeBSD has nothing like Linux’s inotify. " Kind of gave it away for me.
- pbalau 9y ago
  Facebook's watchman uses inotify and I made it build and run on FreeBSD 11 2 days ago. Still need to fix some scripts and I will try to submit it to the ports tree

vetinari 9y ago

Of course Redhat deprecated btrfs support, they are betting on XFS and Stratis. No need to throw resources on competing project, the others in Linux community will carry on. > Perfect as in "everything except certain common features and expected annoyances" like suspend/resume et al. I don't think you read that part carefully with proper understanding. The author said, that these annoyances were when running FreeBSD, and that in Debian it doesn't have them.

cyphar 9y ago

> So awesome that Red Hat Linux even deprecated it. They never "supported" it in the strict meaning of the word, it was only a technical preview and they dropped it from technical preview. That's different from "deprecated" (let alone that Red Hat doesn't have the power to deprecate things in upstream Linux). Not to mention that most/all of Red Hat's btrfs engineers moved to other companies (like Facebook) so nobody was there to maintain it. The more forward-thinking reason for dropping it is that Red Hat is putting all their eggs into devicemapper+XFS (in the form of "Stratis"[1]), so why would they expend engineering resources on more projects than necessary -- especially when they'll probably want customers to switch to Stratis rather than keep them on a never-actually-supported-by-them filesystem. [1]: https://github.com/stratis-storage https://github.com/stratis-storage