friendica.eskimo.com
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
none of the “main” distros default to BTRFS, just “derivatives” default to BTRFS
So you don't regard Fedora (or openSUSE) as "main" distro?
I 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!
News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions.distrowatch.com
I suppose that's a fair assessment. Thanks for the clarification!
However, I do give precedence over their current situations.
- So, if e.g. Arch would continue to exist, but ultimately became the downstream/derivative of another distro, then I would stop regarding it as 'main'. Which one may argue happened between RHEL and Fedora.
- Similarly, if a derivative starts building their own repos and becomes entirely independent from the distro they were originally derived from, then I'd stop regarding them as a derivative. Instead I'd acknowledge them as an independent distro. Like how openSUSE ultimately is derived from Slackware, but they're hardly comparable today.
Regarding NixOS, it and other independent distros are absent in the link you provided. NixOS is literally its own thing and also old; older than Ubuntu and Android for example. So, if anything, it did deserve a mention. Though, I suppose the maker of that website didn't think it was relevant enough to be included over three years ago. NixOS' popularity has thankfully exploded in the mean time, though.
Interactive way to explore and learn about evolution of Linux Distros - rreinold/explore-linuxGitHub
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? "brtfs reports 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.
It is a protocol not a display manager. The desktop runs everything and the apps connect to it.
Network was never part of the design and never will be
And there is were the community has kind diverged. Now days it is either headless servers or desktops.
Running individual apps is interesting but I am afraid that it is not super practical in 2024. However, there is this: github.com/udevbe/greenfield
Xorg is no longer being maintained for the most part and because the code base is so large there isn't anyone who understands the codebase. I still use it for my semi virtual PC as Xorg allows for a lot more flexibility than Wayland plus Xfce4 isn't completely ported yet. There will be a day when I move completely though. Probably when Xfce4 is Wayland native.
HTML5 Wayland compositor :seedling: . Contribute to udevbe/greenfield development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
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.
/var/log nor in journalctl. 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.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.
Wayland as a protocol that apps use to talk to the desktop. It doesn't use network at all really.
You need something like freeRDP for network access.
It is not trying to be a one to one replacement. It is a totally different thing. You are wanting a motorcycle to replace your 2002 pickup truck.
Also X forwarding is broken for most stuff. It probably will work but it will run poorly and use lots of bandwidth. This is because there are layers and layers of work arounds to make modern hardware and software work on it. The X protocol was intended for mainframes in the 80's. It should've died long ago.
@hummus273 Xvnc does not allow you to display individual applications only an entire desktop. I'm monitoring about 20 different computers doing different things and for me it is a significant advantage not to have to bring up a whole desktop but to be able to launch a single graphical application on my existing desktop.
I don't really understand the degree of emotional attachment people have to one solution or another. For me it's a simple application case, for me Wayland is not desirable, not only does it not network, but the embedded X-server as part of the kernel works very effectively by avoiding the kernel/userland switches an ordinary X server would require.
So for my use case, Wayland is NOT a replacement and so I have to object to people arguing that it is a full replacement for X, it is not.
Yes, that is what I meant with not as convenient.
Your use case is covered by waypipe (which in my tests is much more responsive than X11 forwarding).
I think you are confusing stuff here. Which kernel has an embedded X server?
What part of your use case is not covered by waypipe?