On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 9:31 AM John Mellor john.mellor@gmail.com wrote:
- When are we going to see removal of the EXT2 /boot partition? It is
no longer required, as the boot process has been able to use BTRFS for years now.
/boot is critical and using a well debugged file system for it to me seems like an excellent idea. But if you want yours on btrfs, by all means put yours there.
- When are we going to see timeshifting tools built into the desktop,
ala Solaris? That's incredibly useful for developers.
What do you mean by "timeshifting"? Changing the time zone seen by the user? Or do you mean point-in-time snapshots?
- The existing Windows-like update mechanism is undesirable. It solves
a non-existent problem on filesystems with inodes. Like all Unix-like systems, even Ubuntu does not require this. The ability to snapshot means that the weird reasoning that requires 2 reboots to install virtually all update packages is no longer required under any circumstances. When is the software update mechanism getting a fundamental redesign?
I don't think I have ever had to reboot Fedora twice to install updates. As far as I am aware, with Fedora you don't have to reboot at all unless you want to activate a new kernel. Having said that, I find that it is easier to reboot than to try to restart everything that might be needed with an update. I don't find rebooting once-a-week after updating to be onerous - "your milsage may vary". Personally, I find most of the proposed or alternative update mechanisms to be worse than using yum/dnf. Again, *my* opinion, you are free to disagree. (And I will happily acknowledge that specific environments may need capabilities beyond standard dnf - i.e. immutable root, etc.)
- When is a standard backup mechanism that takes advantage of
snapshotting going to be in the distro? The published backup packages do not seem to be aware of the better capabilities available in BTRFS. Wrapping a few CLI tools in a GUI seems like it should be obvious, maybe 200 lines of shellscript or less.
I should think the Fedora project would be happy to examine your submission of the software to do this.
If we are going to make a wishlist of backup capabilities, my top priority would be something that would have built-in de-duplication and work across multiple systems.
- Compression is not the default. Why not? SSDs are 10x slower and
disks are 100x slower than the processors of even 10 years ago, so this omission is slowing the system down.
This depends on the use case - for many people decompression of a compressed file system slows the system down, not its omission.
- Keep the last 3 update snapshots, not just the last 3 kernels. This
would keep backout scenarios a lot more consistent and functional.
*Iff* you use /boot on btrfs (along with the rest of the OS) and use snapshots, this is reasonable. You can configure this on *your* system if you meet the requirements.