/dev/sdX is a file, and both dd, cat can read files in full. You can even try something like zstd to compress it too.

One of the nice things about dd though is you can see the progress with --status=progress

I think it is so that the subvolume can be mounted with different options. You can of course have a mixed layout which might be more convenient, so that say root and home subvolumes mount with the same options, but swap mounts with different options. And the top level never gets mounted at all.

toplevel (not mounted)
+-- @ (subvolume mounted on /)
    +-- home (subvolume, looks like a folder, same mount options as @)
    +-- usr (folder, gets snapshotted by @)
    +-- ...
+-- @swap (subvolume with different options, mounted on /swap)

I set mine up with a purely flat layout so I haven’t verified this is true, but it sounds reasonable.

Here’s the documentation I was looking at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220103010302/https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SysadminGuide#Flat

Screenshot woulda been better just so everyone sees the same thing lol. I wasn’t sure what it would look like because on browser it highlighted some things green, and on Voyager it seems to highlight 4+ space indented as gray. No clue what is going on there :D

vim with :set virtualedit=all gets pretty close being able to “paint” text anywhere… unfortunately i was on my phone and didn’t think to use it

o Windows 10
|
o Linux Mint
|
|\__
|   \
|    o Manjaro KDE
|    |
o Fedora KDE
|    |\__
|    |   \
x    |    o Windows 11
     |    o Windows 11 + Arch Linux
     |    |
     o Arch Linux
     |    |
     |    |
     |    o Windows 11 + Debian KDE
     |    |

hopefully it renders well on your client :D

XWayland normally runs x11 apps seamlessly (more or less) in Wayland

XWayland rootful spawns a window which is like a virtual monitor running a full x11 session inside it. You spawn apps inside of the window using the DISPLAY variable