All these things are visible across the board, both from developers and end users side.
Yes, we interact with it all the time but it isn't something that the end user would notice and that is a great thing. If you are not directly poking around with that stuff, you shouldn't notice it.
That they are so seamless should be seen as a badge of honor.
This year I have installed Linux Mint on computers from people who wanted to jump from Windows to Linux. Every time I booted via USB, installed Linux and 10 minutes later everything was working. This would not have happened 10 years ago. Back then there would always be an issue with a video driver, WiFi driver or audio driver.
Of course there are still hardware issues for some special deviced, but today Linux just runs fine for most people. And that's a great accomplishment.
Funny you say that, as I was installing Ubuntu on peoples laptops and it just worked, like 15 years ago... :-)
Anything with split iGPU/dGPU was a mess no matter what and where, WiFi that was not Intel was a mess, suspend to ram and suspend to disk were a coin flip if the system would wake up again or if it would decide to wake up on its own and overheat itself to panic.
This was absolutely not everyones experience, including mine.
But even from end-user perspective, maybe its hard to see change when you compare one year or so, but over somewhat longer period I definitely see improvements. Over say a decade or so, wifi/bluetooth/trackpad support has significantly improved. Over last 5 years, I think gaming has become huge and you can actually use Linux as gaming machine. In last 3 years or so, I think I've seen my 5k display using Thunderbolt work much better. Fractional scaling also works much nicer.
NVIDIA GPUs are not shitty to use on Linux, and AMD has been working great for slightly longer. UEFI/TPM works much better now as well, where I don't have to worry about booting in legacy mode when using GPU drivers.
I didn't have to think about any of these above. If I think harder, I can likely come up with many more.
eBPF vfs hooks based watchers are really nice.
[edit] details
- you setup a single `mount` - this is the only part that requires cap_sys_admin - then you run a single daemon, this one only needs cap_bpf, and this runs once at startup and is its own self contained program - this daemon writes events into a ringbuf referred to by a file in that bpf mount - you then read that from your standard user program (this can be done by whichever application needs to consume the events)
the events are create, mkdir, delete. renames are automatically decomposed since we hook at the vfs layer. the hook itself is practically free to run and thus there is no question of a performance impact.
Didn't know that. Is it worth looking into over ZFS?
The real problem I had was a low limit to save history. I install a lot of software, Cachy would run the snapshot every time (good), but it only kept like 5-10. And the one I needed to restore to was further back (I can't remember the exact issue), but that was more the defaults of how cachy set it up, and my use case than btrfs/snapper itself.
Whatever tool you use to snapshot btrfs, you may wish to have a custom number of saves if you install tons of software a lot...so you can avoid having too few backups available from the boot menu. I'm sure there was a way around it but I said f it and just reinstalled instead of trying to look up on my crap tablet how to get at the old files (assuming they were still there and just not accessible from the boot menu vs being completely erased).
I do not think it was btrfs that broke, to be clear.
This was like a week before the big hack on AUR, so I wonder if I got hit by a supply attack, but it was pretty shoddy, and broke my system, thus my reinstall saved me from (possibly) a lot more pain down the road.
Raid 5 is still consider unsafe.
Don't run postgresql on it.
So..... it's "very stable, unless you do this or that" state.
Whichever one of my test machines is using btrfs is doing fine, though, so on a subjective level that one's been stable enough.