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.
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.
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.
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.
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
what ZFS situation?
I’ll keep it brief. But it comes down to the fact that, out of the more popular distros, it’s only officially supported on Ubuntu.
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting Started/index.html
i’ve found to work without issue on Fedora, Arch and Ubuntu so maybe it’s supported very well
@lancalot @possiblylinux127 eh, also Garuda defaults to BTRFS, EOS does not default to BTRFS, but it has an option on their Calamares
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.
@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
none of the “main” distros default to BTRFS, just “derivatives” default to BTRFS
So you don’t regard Fedora (or openSUSE) as “main” distro?
@lancalot OpenSUSE is based on SUSE (created in 1994)
Fedora was developed as a continuation of RHEL
Maybe “main” is not well appropriate, I wanted to say “distros that have no precedence & not based on anything”, for example, 0.12 was a “main” distro, MCC Interim Linux was a “derivative” distroI suppose we differ in our definitions. Which is absolutely fine, to be honest*.
For completeness’ sake, IMO it’s basically the intersection of Major Distributions and Independent Distributions. Which happens to consist of Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE and Slackware.
Out of these, Arch and Gentoo don’t have defaults, but their documentation uses ext4 most frequently for examples. For the remaining four, Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs. While Debian and Slackware default to ext4.
In all fairness, one might argue that Distrowatch’s list of major distros is arbitrary. Therefore, we could refine what’s found above by including actually data. For this, I’ll use Boiling Steam’s usage chart based on ProtonDB’s data. This ain’t perfect either, but it’s the best I can do. Here, we notice how both Gentoo and Slackware are not represented. Furthermore, NixOS poses as a candidate instead. For which, we find that (if anything) ext4 is the default. Regardless, it doesn’t actually impact the earlier outcome:
- Arch (and Gentoo) don’t have defaults
- Debian(, Slackware and NixOS) default to ext4
- Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs
Anyhow, what are the main distros according to you? Please offer an exhaustive list, please. Thanks in advance!
@lancalot the “main” that are alive today are (like on this graph) https://rreinold.github.io/explore-linux/ :Debian, Slackware, RHEL, Gentoo, Arch & android
These are only the alive ones, however, I couldn’t find any info about Nix OS so it remains on the maybe category cause I tried it and could not find any hint to the past
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? “
brtfsreports 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”.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.
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.
I have had the opposite experience from you with wayland and btrfs. Recent data loss with btrfs but perfect functionality with Wayland (on KDE and Arch Linux). Moving panels just works. Fractional scaling just works (though i do miss the old method where smaller screens just got supersampled instead of the way they do it now).
The key, probably, is that you’re using KDE - you’re playing “in the box”. I’m sure it works fine in that situation, or under Gnome; the desktops go to great lengths to make sure they work well under Wayland. Things get more dicey if you’re a WM user and are cobbling your environment out of multiple, independent programs.
I believe you about btrfs; enough people have complained about it that I’m convinced I’ve just been exceedingly lucky. I mean, by now I think it’s probably as stable as anything, but it seems like it used to have more issues.
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.
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.
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.
This feels more like long time Linux guy digging in there heals because they like the old days
This sounds like a driver issue or something if all desktops are breaking for you. Have you tried reporting it anywhere?
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/lognor injournalctl. 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.
Btrfs was solid for me some 11 years ago, Wayland still wasn’t solid as of yesterday.
Fam, my experience was one (1) (uno) year ago. And during those five years Wayland made zero progress by itself - it was everyone else who had to do the job of Wayland for free.
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.
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.
People pretend Ubuntu is this great thing but in reality it hasn’t been great in 15 years.
Out of all distros I’ve tried over the years, Ubuntu has always been the buggiest by far.
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.
I stated the version number (17.10), the release notes are here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes
Yes, the release notes you linked do not mention Weston at all.
CTRL+F, “wayland”, 1 of 3 matches
are you being deliberately obtuse or do you expect other people to do everything for you?
You said:
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.
I said:
Yes, the release notes you linked do not mention Weston at all.
Unless you think Wayland is the same as Weston, I don’t see how you think I’m being “deliberately obtuse”.
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.
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.
Don’t use Wayland I guess
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.
I just think people who have issues with Wayland and btrfs are hitting bugs that developers can’t trigger. It’s an unfortunate situation but these people should work closer with developers to get them more info.
The situation sucks because Wayland and btrfs offer so many features but there’s those few people who can’t seem to get them to work reliably.
