As a full time desktop Linux user since 1999 (the actual year of the Linux desktop, I swear) I wish all you Windows folks the best of luck on the next clean install š
ā¦and Happy 30th Birthday āNew Technologyā File System!
- Near instantaneous snapshots and rollback (would help with system restore etc)
- Compression that uses a modern algorithm
- Checking for silent corruption, so users know if their files are no longer correct
Iād add better built in multi-device support and recovery (think RAID and drive pooling) but that might be beyond the āaverageā user (which is always a vague term and I feel there are many types of users within that average). E.g. users that mod their games can benefit from snapshots and/or reflink copies allowing to make backups of their game dirs without taking up any additional space beyond the changes that the mods add.
I agree all those are nice things to have, and things Iād want to see in an update. Now how can you sell those features to management? How do these improve the experience for the everyday end user?
Iād say the snapshots feature could be a major selling point. Windows needs a good backup/restore solution.
It just seems like potentially a ton of work to satisfy the needs of āpeople who think about filesystemsā, which is an extremely small subset of users. I can see how it might be hard to get the manpower and resources needed to rework the Windows default filesystem.
I really have no clue how much work it takes though, so itās just speculation on my end. Iām just curious; on one hand, I do see where NTFS is way behind, but on the otherā¦ who cares? Iāve somehow made it past 20 years of building WIndows PCs without really caring what filesystem Iāve used, from 95 all the way to 11.
Iām not sure you need to sell it to actual users. A lot of benefits of an advanced filesystem could be done by the OS itself, almost transparently. All of the features I mentioned could be managed by Windows, with only minimal changes to the UI. Even reflink copies could just be a control panel option then used by default in Explorer (equivalent of cp --reflink=auto in Linux). And from the OS side, deduplication would help a lot on Windows given all of the DLL bundling, and weird shit they have to do to maintain legacy compatibility, and thatās no small thing given how space inefficient modern Windows installs have become.
It would be some work to upgrade it (maybe a lot given how ancient and likely full of cruft that Windows is full of with legacy compatibility) but it would eventually make the system more reliable and more space efficient.
But yeah, there are challenges. Iām mainly speaking in terms of btrfs which would take some time to port to Windows (although there is a 3rd party driver theyād want to handle it themselves I suspect) but theyāll probably want to use their own ReFS and Iāve not really investigated it seriously so I canāt say how ready that is for prime time. But given that itās being included as an option in some enterprise/server editions of Windows maybe it will be soon in consumer editions soon anyway (as much as Iād prefer something more open and widely supported, at least itās a step forward on Windows).
