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 👍
…and Happy 30th Birthday “New Technology” File System!
How do you know when someone uses linux?
Don’t worry, they’ll tell you
I wouldn’t tell you if I use Linux. I would tell YOU to use Linux. That reminds me… use Linux!
We have extra time to diss Windows since we don’t have to wait for our OS to reboot all the fucking time.
Comment by someone who hasn’t used Windows in an age. When was the last time you rebooted because you had installed new software? When was the last time you ran random code from a forum post to make software work? Because this windows user doesn’t remember ever doing that.
Literally today. That’s why I brought it up. I installed updates and had to reboot twice to finish the task.
Yesterday, on one of my family members computer the Laptop speakers stopped working, after an hour of clicking through legacy Ui trying to fix it(Lenovo Yoga 730 if someone could help me) I gave up, plugged my Linux boot usb in to test if there is a driver issue or so. Miss click in the boot menu and had to wait half an hour for a random Windows update(I did not start it because I used the physical button to turn it off, with Windows 11 turning off the computer via software requires so much mouse movement).
Haven’t used windows in a while huh?
Edit: Just to clarify, I run ALOT of operating systems in my lab; RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu (several LTS flavors), TruNAS, Unraid, RancherOS, ESXi, Windows 2003 thru 2022, Windows 10, Windows 11.
My latest headless Steam box with Windows 11 based on a AMD 5600g basically reboots about as fast as I can retype my password in RDP.
Omg. This hits home. I think Linux has prompted / asked me to reboot one time since I installed it 2 months ago. Windows wants you to reboot everytime you change anything. I didn’t realize how insanely often it asks until I had something to compare it to.
I got a friend trying Linux for the first time and they asked for some help picking software to install, like which office suite or photo app etc… They just instinctively rebooted after everything they did like it was a pavlovian response, lol.
The last update to NTFS was in 2004.
The fact that ReFS doesn’t even support all the features NTFS does is pathetic.
Genuine question, not being sarcastic.
What’s the benefit to the average end user to modernizing NTFS?
Sure, I love having btrfs on my NAS for all the features it brings, but I’m not a normal person. What significant changes that would affect your average user does NTFS require to modernize it?
I just see it as an “if it’s not broken” type thing. I can’t say I’ve ever given the slightest care about what filesystem my computer was running until I got into NAS/backups, which itself was a good 10 years after I got into building PCs. The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter when I’m reinstalling every few years and have backups elsewhere.
- 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
I’d add better built in multi-device support and recovery (think RAID and drive pooling) but that might be beyond the “average” 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 I’d 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?
I’d 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 “people who think about filesystems”, 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 it’s just speculation on my end. I’m just curious; on one hand, I do see where NTFS is way behind, but on the other… who cares? I’ve somehow made it past 20 years of building WIndows PCs without really caring what filesystem I’ve used, from 95 all the way to 11.
At the very least, better filesystem level compression support. A somewhat common usecase might be people who use emulators. Both Wii U and PS3 are consoles where major emulators just use a folder on your filesystem. I know a lot of emulator users who are non-technical to the point that they don’t have “show hidden files and folders” enabled.
Also your average person wouldn’t necessarily need checksums, but having them built into the filesystem would lead to overall more reliability.
Unbelievably, Windows still has a ridiculously short filepath length limit.
Nope, long paths are supported since 8.1 or 10 person bit you have to enable it yourself because very old apps can break
Are you writing parahraphs for folder/file names? That’s one “issue” I never had problem with.
Maybe enterprises need a solution for it but that’s a very different use case from most end users.
Improvements are always welcome but saying it’s “ridiculously short” makes the problem sound worse than it is.
File paths. Not just the filename, the entire directory path, including the filename. It’s way too easy to run up against limit if you’re actually organized.
It might be 255 characters for the entire path?
I’ve run into it at work where I don’t get to choose many elements. Thanks “My Name - OneDrive” and people who insist on embedding file information into filenames.
You like diving 12 folders deep to find the file you’re after? I feel like there’s better, more efficient ways to be organized using metadata, but maybe I’m wrong.
You want your filesystems to be old and stable. It’s new filesystems you want to view with suspicion… not battle tested.
I wouldn’t really say so. Of course it’s not a good idea take the absolutely latest system as your daily driver since it’s propably not bugproof yet but also you don’t want to use something extremely old just because it’s been tested much more because then you’re just trading away perfomance and features for nothing. For example ext4 is extremely reliable and the stable version is 15year newer than NTFS.
I’m a client-side technician working in a predominantly Windows environment for the last 8 going on 9 years.
Out of all the issues I have seen on Windows, filesystem issues is rather low on that list as far as prevalence, as I don’t recall one that’s not explainable by hardware failure or interrupted write. Not saying it doesn’t happen and that ext4 is bad or anything, but I don’t work in Linux all that much so me saying that I never had an issue with ext4 isn’t the same because I don’t have nearly the same amount of experience.
Also ext came about in 1992, so 31 years so far to hash out the bugs is no small amount of time. Especially in terms of computing.
I read « NFTs turns 30 yo ». Definitely need an exorcism.
