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.
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.
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.