Happy 30th Birthday “New Technology” File System! Thanks for 30 years of demonstrating Linux superiority with a gap that widens with every new kernel release 👍
I can’t believe Microsoft is still using this piece of crap filesystem. If they had a CoW filesystem they could even paper over the mess that is Windows Update without having to actually fix it, they could save petabytes of storage over the world and significantly improve reliability all in one go. Let’s not even mention how NTFS is amazingly slow on hard drives, manages to fragment to hell and back without doing anything, requires offline repairs like it was FAT32 and its compression barely does anything while massively slowing down the computer.
Yet here I am envying btrfs, APFS, ZFS and even fucking XFS for their reflinks and CoW.
In fact, not even WSL uses a modern FS, I think Microsoft is allergic to modern FSs.
None of these problems are really dealbreakers for a consumer-oriented file system in 2023. Not even ext4 supports CoW. Now that everyone boots off an SSD, things like file fragmentation no longer matter, and most of NTFS’ continued slowness has more to do with Windows itself than the actual file system.
ReFS is Microsoft’s new file system meant for more advanced use cases. It supports many but not all of these advanced features. Starting with Windows 11, you can actually boot off a ReFS drive, though I’m not sure that is a recommended configuration.
NTFS provided features other filesystems still don’t really provide, 20 years ago. The ACLs NTFS provides are decades ahead of their Linux equivalents, it had compression, quotas and encryption long before it was cool. The 65k character limit for a file name is small compared to its modern brethren but that still gives you more than enough space.
Microsoft’s choices related to fragmentation were unfortunate at the time, but now that hard disks are mostly things in third hand PCs and NAS setups, that’s no longer a concern. The Windows driver isn’t exactly the fastest thing out there, but its reliability is great. The only thing I can hold against it is its license, but that’s been a problem with ZFS for years too.
Microsoft came up with ReFS, and it was actually a good idea, but it wasn’t that useful in practice when NTFS could do the job just fine.
Things like data deduplication are actually possible in NTFS. It seems to be locked to server SKUs on Windows but the filesystem can do it.
All of that said, there’s nothing stopping you from getting a filesystem driver and using ZFS on your windows machine if you really need a CoW filesystem.
XFS is 29 years old and certainly still in use as well.
I heard, this commercial distribution “Windows” still uses it. But this thing just recently got a (very limited) package manger. So they seem to be very late with adapting to current technology.
On the bright side it only very rarely destroys itself when updating. However, some very loud foss distributions do it fairly often.
It forces you to update and then works at “something something” for 5 minutes to 5 hours and then reboots and does the same thing again but after logging in, none of your applications are updated and also none of the system seems to be changed with the updates. You don’t even get proper status information during updates.
Of course it doesn’t destroy itself when it doesn’t change anything …
Oof this is only thing if you have the os on an HDD. I’ve had similar behavior on *buntu running off of an HDD.
On an sdd or nvme you’ll never have stuff like this happen.
There is an argument to be made for it being better ux to not have programs update without telling you. Winget isn’t perfect, but it can auto update your stuff if need be.
It’s good at destroying other OSs that may be installed alongside though
