Why does Fedora create what seems to be arbitrary, albeit minor differences to things like grub; and the btrfs naming convention which only serve to cause the failure of popular and useful packages like grub-customizer and timeshift respectfully ?
Such as? Any specific examples you can allude to?
I take it you refer to the fact that Fedora follows the bootloader specification, which not a lot of distros do? You could turn the question around and ask why other distros donāt follow it.
If thatās not what you meant, please be more specific about which changes you are talking about.
I think your BTRFS naming comment only applies to Timeshift, not grub-customizer, thatās probably just referring back to the GRUB changes in your first statement. If not, let us know.
And as for Timeshift, to quote from the project page: āIn BTRFS mode, snapshots are taken using the in-built features of the BTRFS filesystem. BTRFS snapshots are supported only on BTRFS systems having an Ubuntu-type subvolume layout (with @ and @home subvolumes).ā
So, basically you expect Fedora to use the same arbitrary naming convention as Ubuntu. Ubuntu and Canonical, who are known for following conventions and standards from other distros and have never done their own thing just to be different ā¦ (upstart, Mir, Unity, snap, uutils coreutils, ā¦ just saying).
I personally find the prefix of @ for BTRFS volumes pointless and donāt use it (and I donāt use Timeshift). But if someone wants to use Timeshift on Fedora, they can create their own advanced BTRFS layout in the structure that Timeshift expects. I would not expect a distro to cater to every userspace application possible, the number of combinations is simply too big.
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Grubcustomizer is a debian based software which uses their grub specifications. If you want to make it work for Fedora someone would need to adapt it for the Fedora specific grub setup. As nobody did it, and as several installations got broken, the grubcustomizer got removed (retired) from Fedora Repository.
p.s.
The grubcustomizer is mainly to makeup the boot process (beautifying). The default in Fedora is the black text based menu which comes almost since the birth of Fedora with it?!
Just FYI for everyone,
it appears that timeshift upstream is interested in expanding the feature to make it more configurable. As of this moment there appears to be a pull request with a feature implementation submitted by a contributor to make it possible to configure the subvolume naming pattern in use.
I wonder if that feature branch is in a state where it could be tested by some BTRFS savvy Fedora users who could provide useful feedback to the upstream contributor while the feature code is still in PR review.
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I should probably add some color on the underlying question.. about conventions
There is actual potential benefit to users that install multiple distributions on the same bare metal system if all the distributions use different btrfs subvolume schemes by default.
Hypothetical.. if I want to install a 2nd linux distribution on bare metal side by side with fedora.. if the 2nd distro uses different naming convention you lower the risk of unexpected behavior when multiple distros try to share the same subvolume. I believe this may be a known gotcha for users who want to install mint side-by-side with ubuntu. I point it out because they share the @ convention that timeshift was originally built for, as it was a project that came out of the mint ecosystem.
Anyways, auto-detecting which OS you are booted into and choosing the correct default naming scheme the way this upstream feature appears to do, seems reasonable to me as a way to select reasonable defaults for which subvolumes to snapshot. Itās great to see the upstream project growing to be more distro-agnostic about how it figures out what defaults to use. This should reduce the need for downstream distro patches.
But that auto-detection is probably not enough. The subvolume names that non-containized distros use can be renamed via local admin operation, and the tools need to be admin user confiurable enough to account for that. So its a good idea if users, like those multi-booting linux distro, who end up needing to use non-default sub-volume names also test the new upstream enhancement proposed for timeshift.
Though it is interesting to me that the tool doesnāt just try to figure what subvolumes exist and direct users to select which of the existing btrfs subvolumes to snapshot if it detects a set of subvolumes its not expecting as the common cases its aware of. Thatās probably the next level enhancement, to break the assumption that the subvolumes are just root and home equivalents.