If the system can’t keep up with the animation of e.g. Gnome’s overview, the fps halfes because of double buffered vsync for a moment. This is perceived as stutter.
With triple buffer vsync the fps only drop a little (e .g 60 fps -> 55 fps), which isn’t as big of drop of fps, so the stutter isn’t as big (if it’s even noticeable).
You’re right, atomic snapshots are a big advantage of CoW fs.
Rsync backups done while the system is running have a chance of being broken, while CoW fs snapshots are instant and seem basically as if the system suddenly lost power.
And if a copied file is changed, btrfs only stores the difference instead of two complete files. E.g. if the 1GB file1 is copied to file2, they will take 1GB total. If 100MB is appended to file2, the total storage usage is 1,1GB
FWUPD/LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) has made it remarkably easy to update a lot of system firmware and device/peripheral firmware under Linux. Prior to widespread LVFS support it was often a daunting chore for Linux users to update device firmware with frequently needing to boot into a Microsoft Windows installation, resorting to FreeDOS for system BIOS updates in the olden days, or go without updating firmware.
A new component “systemd-bsod” has been added to show logged error messages full-screen if they have a “LOG_EMERG” log level. This is intended as a tool for displaying emergency log messages full-screen on boot failures. Yes, BSOD in this case short for “Blue Screen of Death”. This was worked on as part of Outreachy 2023. The systemd-bsod will also display a QR code for getting more information on the error causing the boot failure.
Hibernation into swap files backed by Btrfs are now supported.
Yes. Usually the OS installer takes care of creating a root and home subvolume. Except Arch and similar barebones installer have instructions in the wiki.
Bcachefs still misses major features, so it’s possible to expect that performance will change over time. Just because bcachefs is upstreamed to Linux doesn’t mean it’s finished.
Finally, I might try disabling XWayland once wine wayland ships in proton. The only remaining apps using X11 on my system are electron apps and wine (oh, I forgot Java).
It’s interesting to finally see all the work on wayland coming together. Only a few years ago I still had to switch back to i3 because sway didn’t work well for gaming (no vrr, dmabuf), and now it’s only a few things missing.
KDE fixed a lot of Wayland bugs over the last months and especially with the upcoming launch of Plasma 6.0, so I’d give it a try again now or in half a year.
Nvidia also constantly fixes the problems with their Wayland support so it’s only getting better. Debian doesn’t have recent enough packages to have a good KDE Wayland experience.
Gnome Wayland doesn’t support features like vrr/adaptive sync or tearing, so it isn’t a good gaming experience. Otherwise it’s great.