4 ms·

btrfs is a drop-in replacement. Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. With Wayland many basic features are missing even today. (Yes I know someon

by iqanq 5y ago

btrfs is a drop-in replacement. Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. With Wayland many basic features are missing even today. (Yes I know someone will explain here that everything works. Don't make me laugh)

krageon 5y ago
> Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. You must perform regular maintenance on btrfs or it will quite simply break. This is a huge departure from for example ext4, which is (to the end user at least) hassle free.
- byhemechi 5y ago
  this is not my experience, btrfs has been just as stable as ext4 and zfs for me. maybe i've just been lucky?
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Ext4 is transparent for me, but I can confirm BTRFS to have failed me several times. n = 1 of course.
  - pizza234 5y ago
    I'm not sure about the "maintenance" part, however, my experience was: - a few years ago, one system would suddently not boot (due to btrfs); this happened twice - nowadays, on one system, background scrub doesn't start This is anecdata of course, but I've never had a good impression overall. I don't see any reason to use btrfs rather than ZFS, considering that Ubuntu and derivatives are starting to add builtin support.
  - krageon 5y ago
    It is a technical certainty AFAICT. If this has not impacted you, it will some day :) Scripts for actually doing so can be found f.e. here: https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance
eptcyka 5y ago
BTRFS is a great solution to the problem of having data be accessible reliably. I've had issues with Wayland, and I've also had issues with X, but I've been using Gnome's Wayland session for 4 years now. More so than actual window manager issues, I've been experiencing issues with my GPU drivers. FOSS software has never been without it's operational issues. I don't understand what's up with this prejudice towards Wayland. You do understand, that it's the X developers themselves that advocated for Wayland (besides designing and developing it), don't you? X originates in the 80s and it's not a design that stands the test of time. Since the late 00s, all of the window managers had already started doing compositing themselves, circumventing all of the nice layers of the X protocol and just copying pixel buffers around, the interface with X itself is blocking, vertical sync is impossible, security is a joke, the code was untenable. I understand that in as heterogenous software ecosystem as desktop Linux, any large fundamental change will be ugly because there is no shared release cycle and there is no platform, so one can't just change everything overnight, but as far as I can tell, Wayland has been usable for quite a while now. Literal years. Unless you're using hardware vendors that are hostile to FOSS.
- sprash 5y ago
  > X originates in the 80s and it's not a design that stands the test of time. Actually the fact that X11 can be used today despite the fact that we went through several cycles of vastly changing GPU hardware shows that it absolutely has stood the test of time.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Ncurses apps can also display GUIs for a long time now, but it doesn’t mean that they are actually good solutions. The X server became a pretty useless middle man between clients and the compositor. And the vastly changed GPU hardware is the reason we should prefer a superior solution - we no longer draw as we did 3 decades ago, so we should cut out the middle man.
    - sprash 5y ago
      > Ncurses apps can also display GUIs Terminal applications stood the test of time as well. For everything that is not graphical in nature they are indeed good solutions. > The X server became a pretty useless middle man between clients and the compositor. X is a middle man but far from useless. Just as Wayland is a middle man as well. And looking at the protocol actual access to GPU memory is more opaque on Wayland than on X11 and as such to me Wayland is a more intrusive middleman. If you want to "cut out the middle man" you have to use DRM directly.

by iqanq 5y ago

krageon 5y ago

> Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. You must perform regular maintenance on btrfs or it will quite simply break. This is a huge departure from for example ext4, which is (to the end user at least) hassle free.

byhemechi 5y ago
this is not my experience, btrfs has been just as stable as ext4 and zfs for me. maybe i've just been lucky?
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Ext4 is transparent for me, but I can confirm BTRFS to have failed me several times. n = 1 of course.
- pizza234 5y ago
  I'm not sure about the "maintenance" part, however, my experience was: - a few years ago, one system would suddently not boot (due to btrfs); this happened twice - nowadays, on one system, background scrub doesn't start This is anecdata of course, but I've never had a good impression overall. I don't see any reason to use btrfs rather than ZFS, considering that Ubuntu and derivatives are starting to add builtin support.
- krageon 5y ago
  It is a technical certainty AFAICT. If this has not impacted you, it will some day :) Scripts for actually doing so can be found f.e. here: https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance

eptcyka 5y ago

BTRFS is a great solution to the problem of having data be accessible reliably. I've had issues with Wayland, and I've also had issues with X, but I've been using Gnome's Wayland session for 4 years now. More so than actual window manager issues, I've been experiencing issues with my GPU drivers. FOSS software has never been without it's operational issues. I don't understand what's up with this prejudice towards Wayland. You do understand, that it's the X developers themselves that advocated for Wayland (besides designing and developing it), don't you? X originates in the 80s and it's not a design that stands the test of time. Since the late 00s, all of the window managers had already started doing compositing themselves, circumventing all of the nice layers of the X protocol and just copying pixel buffers around, the interface with X itself is blocking, vertical sync is impossible, security is a joke, the code was untenable. I understand that in as heterogenous software ecosystem as desktop Linux, any large fundamental change will be ugly because there is no shared release cycle and there is no platform, so one can't just change everything overnight, but as far as I can tell, Wayland has been usable for quite a while now. Literal years. Unless you're using hardware vendors that are hostile to FOSS.

sprash 5y ago
> X originates in the 80s and it's not a design that stands the test of time. Actually the fact that X11 can be used today despite the fact that we went through several cycles of vastly changing GPU hardware shows that it absolutely has stood the test of time.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Ncurses apps can also display GUIs for a long time now, but it doesn’t mean that they are actually good solutions. The X server became a pretty useless middle man between clients and the compositor. And the vastly changed GPU hardware is the reason we should prefer a superior solution - we no longer draw as we did 3 decades ago, so we should cut out the middle man.
  - sprash 5y ago
    > Ncurses apps can also display GUIs Terminal applications stood the test of time as well. For everything that is not graphical in nature they are indeed good solutions. > The X server became a pretty useless middle man between clients and the compositor. X is a middle man but far from useless. Just as Wayland is a middle man as well. And looking at the protocol actual access to GPU memory is more opaque on Wayland than on X11 and as such to me Wayland is a more intrusive middleman. If you want to "cut out the middle man" you have to use DRM directly.