4 ms·

Strongly disagree. Hardware support improved by leaps and bounds last decade and a half. Namespace isolation and cgroups driven containerization. eBPF appeared

by reisse 1mo ago

Strongly disagree. Hardware support improved by leaps and bounds last decade and a half. Namespace isolation and cgroups driven containerization. eBPF appeared and gained adoption. Async I/O (and later just everything async) converged on io_uring. Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever. All kinds of scheduling were iterated and iterated over. All these things are visible across the board, both from developers and end users side.

Mond_ 1mo ago
I run Linux as my primary operating system and I have never even heard of eBPF! I'd be surprised if most end users have.
- truncate 1mo ago
  Seems like parent thread spoke from perspective of developer/tech savvy person. But even from end-user perspective, maybe its hard to see change when you compare one year or so, but over somewhat longer period I definitely see improvements. Over say a decade or so, wifi/bluetooth/trackpad support has significantly improved. Over last 5 years, I think gaming has become huge and you can actually use Linux as gaming machine. In last 3 years or so, I think I've seen my 5k display using Thunderbolt work much better. Fractional scaling also works much nicer. NVIDIA GPUs are not shitty to use on Linux, and AMD has been working great for slightly longer. UEFI/TPM works much better now as well, where I don't have to worry about booting in legacy mode when using GPU drivers. I didn't have to think about any of these above. If I think harder, I can likely come up with many more.
  - doubled112 1mo ago
    [dead]
- porridgeraisin 1mo ago
  Well ya, it's more useful in observability usecases than desktop ones. But recently I've been using for a consumer desktop usecase. I made a file watcher with it. I'm sure you're familiar with the woes of using inotify/fanotify. eBPF vfs hooks based watchers are really nice. [edit] details - you setup a single `mount` - this is the only part that requires cap_sys_admin - then you run a single daemon, this one only needs cap_bpf, and this runs once at startup and is its own self contained program - this daemon writes events into a ringbuf referred to by a file in that bpf mount - you then read that from your standard user program (this can be done by whichever application needs to consume the events) the events are create, mkdir, delete. renames are automatically decomposed since we hook at the vfs layer. the hook itself is practically free to run and thus there is no question of a performance impact.
- stusmall 1mo ago
  You may know more about what it powers. It has enabled much faster, higher quality, more stable security software on Linux. Many modern security tools are built on top of it. While end users might not know it by name, it has made Linux easier to support in the enterprise.
ColdStream 1mo ago
I have been using Linux on the desktop since the late 90's. Other than increase hardware support, I have not tangentially noticed/felt almost anything you have mentioned here. When I fire up the desktop and load Firefox, I do not feel or see the sandboxing, the scheduler, the file system or the I/O. It just works. Yes, we interact with it all the time but it isn't something that the end user would notice and that is a great thing. If you are not directly poking around with that stuff, you shouldn't notice it. That they are so seamless should be seen as a badge of honor.
- bdhdhduuyd 1mo ago
  I also have been using Linux for over 20 years and I agree that hardware support is the most noticable. This year I have installed Linux Mint on computers from people who wanted to jump from Windows to Linux. Every time I booted via USB, installed Linux and 10 minutes later everything was working. This would not have happened 10 years ago. Back then there would always be an issue with a video driver, WiFi driver or audio driver. Of course there are still hardware issues for some special deviced, but today Linux just runs fine for most people. And that's a great accomplishment.
  - hdgvhicv 1mo ago
    I’ve seen people say that for 20 years
  - 0points 1mo ago
    > This would not have happened 10 years ago. Funny you say that, as I was installing Ubuntu on peoples laptops and it just worked, like 15 years ago... :-)
    - mschuster91 1mo ago
      Only on a select combination of blessed components and BIOS/EFI not half-ass broken to the tune it only worked somewhat stable on Windows. Anything with split iGPU/dGPU was a mess no matter what and where, WiFi that was not Intel was a mess, suspend to ram and suspend to disk were a coin flip if the system would wake up again or if it would decide to wake up on its own and overheat itself to panic.
shepherdjerred 1mo ago
btrfs is stable?? I used it a couple of years ago and really didn’t have a positive experience. I’ve found ZFS much more stable
- FacelessJim 1mo ago
  Been using it for a year or so on my main box. Never had any kind of issue. Snapshots saved my ass a couple of times. All in all it’s been pretty boring (in a good way)
- j16sdiz 1mo ago
  The disk full scenario is greatly improved. Still buggy, but it is recoverable. Raid 5 is still consider unsafe. Don't run postgresql on it. So..... it's "very stable, unless you do this or that" state.
- usr1106 1mo ago
  It was the default on SUSE / OpenSUSE for years. Haven't used them for a while, not sure whether it still is. No problems with basic functionality including snapshots. I believe some RAID configurations were experimental for long time.
- abc123abc123 1mo ago
  Yes. I have used it for 15 years without any problems. Just keep track of snapshots and consumed snapshot space. Besides that, works great!
- kjs3 1mo ago
  It's basically fine as long as you read the release notes carefully and don't do anything the release notes say not to do (e.g. RAID5, let the disk fill up). It still has some sharp edges, but they're all documented.
- a96 1mo ago
  Maybe. I think there's still no chance of repair when it blows up. Only FS since Reiser and early XFS that I've completely lost data to on healthy hardware. Whichever one of my test machines is using btrfs is doing fine, though, so on a subjective level that one's been stable enough.
arikrahman 1mo ago
Yes, even Bcachefs was on and off through versions
hdjrudni 1mo ago
> Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever Didn't know that. Is it worth looking into over ZFS?
- wormius 1mo ago
  For desktop I think it would be fine, though if you have the advanced needs of all the ZFS features I would stick with ZFS, but I had no problem. The real problem I had was a low limit to save history. I install a lot of software, Cachy would run the snapshot every time (good), but it only kept like 5-10. And the one I needed to restore to was further back (I can't remember the exact issue), but that was more the defaults of how cachy set it up, and my use case than btrfs/snapper itself. Whatever tool you use to snapshot btrfs, you may wish to have a custom number of saves if you install tons of software a lot...so you can avoid having too few backups available from the boot menu. I'm sure there was a way around it but I said f it and just reinstalled instead of trying to look up on my crap tablet how to get at the old files (assuming they were still there and just not accessible from the boot menu vs being completely erased). I do not think it was btrfs that broke, to be clear. This was like a week before the big hack on AUR, so I wonder if I got hit by a supply attack, but it was pretty shoddy, and broke my system, thus my reinstall saved me from (possibly) a lot more pain down the road.
- rcxdude 1mo ago
  It still doesn't have a great reputation.
throw0101d 1mo ago
> Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever. Right: > The RAID56 feature provides striping and parity over several devices, same as the traditional RAID5/6. There are some implementation and design deficiencies that make it unreliable for some corner cases and the feature should not be used in production, only for evaluation or testing. The power failure safety for metadata with RAID56 is not 100%. * https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#man-btrfs5-raid56-status https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#man-b...

by reisse 1mo ago

Mond_ 1mo ago

I run Linux as my primary operating system and I have never even heard of eBPF! I'd be surprised if most end users have.

truncate 1mo ago
Seems like parent thread spoke from perspective of developer/tech savvy person. But even from end-user perspective, maybe its hard to see change when you compare one year or so, but over somewhat longer period I definitely see improvements. Over say a decade or so, wifi/bluetooth/trackpad support has significantly improved. Over last 5 years, I think gaming has become huge and you can actually use Linux as gaming machine. In last 3 years or so, I think I've seen my 5k display using Thunderbolt work much better. Fractional scaling also works much nicer. NVIDIA GPUs are not shitty to use on Linux, and AMD has been working great for slightly longer. UEFI/TPM works much better now as well, where I don't have to worry about booting in legacy mode when using GPU drivers. I didn't have to think about any of these above. If I think harder, I can likely come up with many more.
- doubled112 1mo ago
  [dead]
porridgeraisin 1mo ago
Well ya, it's more useful in observability usecases than desktop ones. But recently I've been using for a consumer desktop usecase. I made a file watcher with it. I'm sure you're familiar with the woes of using inotify/fanotify. eBPF vfs hooks based watchers are really nice. [edit] details - you setup a single `mount` - this is the only part that requires cap_sys_admin - then you run a single daemon, this one only needs cap_bpf, and this runs once at startup and is its own self contained program - this daemon writes events into a ringbuf referred to by a file in that bpf mount - you then read that from your standard user program (this can be done by whichever application needs to consume the events) the events are create, mkdir, delete. renames are automatically decomposed since we hook at the vfs layer. the hook itself is practically free to run and thus there is no question of a performance impact.
stusmall 1mo ago
You may know more about what it powers. It has enabled much faster, higher quality, more stable security software on Linux. Many modern security tools are built on top of it. While end users might not know it by name, it has made Linux easier to support in the enterprise.

ColdStream 1mo ago

I have been using Linux on the desktop since the late 90's. Other than increase hardware support, I have not tangentially noticed/felt almost anything you have mentioned here. When I fire up the desktop and load Firefox, I do not feel or see the sandboxing, the scheduler, the file system or the I/O. It just works. Yes, we interact with it all the time but it isn't something that the end user would notice and that is a great thing. If you are not directly poking around with that stuff, you shouldn't notice it. That they are so seamless should be seen as a badge of honor.

bdhdhduuyd 1mo ago
I also have been using Linux for over 20 years and I agree that hardware support is the most noticable. This year I have installed Linux Mint on computers from people who wanted to jump from Windows to Linux. Every time I booted via USB, installed Linux and 10 minutes later everything was working. This would not have happened 10 years ago. Back then there would always be an issue with a video driver, WiFi driver or audio driver. Of course there are still hardware issues for some special deviced, but today Linux just runs fine for most people. And that's a great accomplishment.
- hdgvhicv 1mo ago
  I’ve seen people say that for 20 years
- 0points 1mo ago
  > This would not have happened 10 years ago. Funny you say that, as I was installing Ubuntu on peoples laptops and it just worked, like 15 years ago... :-)
  - mschuster91 1mo ago
    Only on a select combination of blessed components and BIOS/EFI not half-ass broken to the tune it only worked somewhat stable on Windows. Anything with split iGPU/dGPU was a mess no matter what and where, WiFi that was not Intel was a mess, suspend to ram and suspend to disk were a coin flip if the system would wake up again or if it would decide to wake up on its own and overheat itself to panic.

shepherdjerred 1mo ago

btrfs is stable?? I used it a couple of years ago and really didn’t have a positive experience. I’ve found ZFS much more stable

FacelessJim 1mo ago
Been using it for a year or so on my main box. Never had any kind of issue. Snapshots saved my ass a couple of times. All in all it’s been pretty boring (in a good way)
j16sdiz 1mo ago
The disk full scenario is greatly improved. Still buggy, but it is recoverable. Raid 5 is still consider unsafe. Don't run postgresql on it. So..... it's "very stable, unless you do this or that" state.
usr1106 1mo ago
It was the default on SUSE / OpenSUSE for years. Haven't used them for a while, not sure whether it still is. No problems with basic functionality including snapshots. I believe some RAID configurations were experimental for long time.
abc123abc123 1mo ago
Yes. I have used it for 15 years without any problems. Just keep track of snapshots and consumed snapshot space. Besides that, works great!
kjs3 1mo ago
It's basically fine as long as you read the release notes carefully and don't do anything the release notes say not to do (e.g. RAID5, let the disk fill up). It still has some sharp edges, but they're all documented.
a96 1mo ago
Maybe. I think there's still no chance of repair when it blows up. Only FS since Reiser and early XFS that I've completely lost data to on healthy hardware. Whichever one of my test machines is using btrfs is doing fine, though, so on a subjective level that one's been stable enough.

arikrahman 1mo ago

Yes, even Bcachefs was on and off through versions

hdjrudni 1mo ago

> Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever Didn't know that. Is it worth looking into over ZFS?

wormius 1mo ago
For desktop I think it would be fine, though if you have the advanced needs of all the ZFS features I would stick with ZFS, but I had no problem. The real problem I had was a low limit to save history. I install a lot of software, Cachy would run the snapshot every time (good), but it only kept like 5-10. And the one I needed to restore to was further back (I can't remember the exact issue), but that was more the defaults of how cachy set it up, and my use case than btrfs/snapper itself. Whatever tool you use to snapshot btrfs, you may wish to have a custom number of saves if you install tons of software a lot...so you can avoid having too few backups available from the boot menu. I'm sure there was a way around it but I said f it and just reinstalled instead of trying to look up on my crap tablet how to get at the old files (assuming they were still there and just not accessible from the boot menu vs being completely erased). I do not think it was btrfs that broke, to be clear. This was like a week before the big hack on AUR, so I wonder if I got hit by a supply attack, but it was pretty shoddy, and broke my system, thus my reinstall saved me from (possibly) a lot more pain down the road.
rcxdude 1mo ago
It still doesn't have a great reputation.

throw0101d 1mo ago

> Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever. Right: > The RAID56 feature provides striping and parity over several devices, same as the traditional RAID5/6. There are some implementation and design deficiencies that make it unreliable for some corner cases and the feature should not be used in production, only for evaluation or testing. The power failure safety for metadata with RAID56 is not 100%. * https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#man-btrfs5-raid56-status https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#man-b...