Comment by Possibly linux@lemmy.zip on Btrfs should've been Wayland

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.

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.

Btrfs was solid for me some 11 years ago, Wayland still wasn’t solid as of yesterday.

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.

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/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.

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.

@Aganim @loutr This makes sense, these people that have some irrational emotion attachment to Wayland in spite of it’s lack of functionality, do not. Now, if they have a use case that makes sense to them, they’re playing a game that needs 200fps, then fine, but if the use case doesn’t fit then don’t use it.

This feels more like long time Linux guy digging in there heals because they like the old days

@possiblylinux127 @loutr I like to get work done, some tools are helpful to that end, Rust for example, superior to C in as much as it makes it much more difficult to make mistakes with memory allocation without resorting to the grossness of garbage collection, but when new things only detract from work flow, then yea I prefer the older things that work. When new things benefit it, Rust for example, or the latest kernels in terms of efficiency, then I use them. I don’t like change for changes sake, I like change when it improves things, in my use case, Wayland does not do that.

@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

Funny how you call people idiots yet it seems like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

I think most people aren’t living in the past. What is your use case exactly? What do you need a remote GUI for? RDP and other protocols exist and are much better especially in terms of performance.

Tell me you don’t understand what “remote gui” means without telling me.

@possiblylinux127 Again rdp, vnc, x2go, ONLY work for full desktops, they do not work for individual applications. If I’ve got a terminal session into a server and decide I want to fire up synaptic, X does that for me, Wayland doesn’t and the overhead of starting an entire desktop to run a single app for a few minutes does not make sense.

they do not work for individual applications

as someone else replied to you earlier, waypipe exists, and is packaged in distros, and does what you’re asking for.

There is also a newer thing called wprs, “Like xpra, but for Wayland, and written in Rust”: https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs#comparison-to-waypipe which sounds promising

Hey holy shit! Someone else who knows this is in there! Two of us!

I got around this just using a local IPC on whichever box and a wlroots compositor (I think river right now? They’re all tiny). Wezterm is just locked in a remote multi plexed session I can fire scripts from the one with a keyboard. Startup isn’t really noticeable in wasted time, but it isn’t nothing. Consider this a promise to circle back if I do find something, it would have been a pain in the ass at another job.

Broadly I think it’s funny a lot of the same people who taught me the Unix philosophy don’t seem to understand the irony of refusing to move from the monolith. (Not that that’s you specifically, but Wayland actually gets it right for the most part).

The defense you hear from people like me is less fingers in ears that there are problems, and more the response to people who have tried nothing and are out of ideas on how to arrive at the same place differently. Im currently doing several things I was AGGRESSIVELY informed were impossible and wouldn’t ever be, but there’s so few people using some of the functionality in xorg I wonder if its back to hacking things together with pipes and scripts for the niches, remote display pretty much has been superseded by the common web server.

I started IT hearing stories of migrations back and forth from xorg/plan 9, and I did some of the troubleshooting in the early xorg era. you can trust me or not when I say I will choose the situation with xorg/Wayland now infinity times over that.

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: https://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.

I mean there is waypipe now …

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Btrfs should've been Wayland

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