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.
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.
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).
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.
This sounds like a driver issue or something if all desktops are breaking for you. Have you tried reporting it anywhere?
@possiblylinux127 @lambalicious Wayland may be solid as a local display manager but it does not network.
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
