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!
Join the dozens!
Literally dozens?!? Sign me up!
We have extra time to diss Windows since we don’t have to wait for our OS to reboot all the fucking time.
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.
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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.
A couple days ago, but I have a company issued remote managed windows laptop, and I get zero say in the matter.
At least once a month my system forces me to do a reboot for updates.
I can tell it to wait, but I can not tell it to stop.
Literally today. That’s why I brought it up. I installed updates and had to reboot twice to finish the task.
Many Linux package managers themselves tell you you should reboot your system after updates, especially if the update has touched system packages. You can definitely run into problems that will leave you scratching your head if you don’t.
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).
And boy do you guys ever talk about Windows… Like constantly. Go on any Linux subreddit or community and 8 of the top 10 posts will mention Windows.
I have extra time because I don’t waste my time on making up arguments!
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.
This will vary by distro. Arch for example expects (but doesn’t ask) you to reboot quite often since their packages are “bleeding edge” and update the kernel often.
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.
Can it die now? ZFS all the things!
What the hell ever happened with ReiserFS (or whatever it was called?) It was supposed to be used in Vista, and then just never was.
It’s primary write and maintainer killed his wife and went to prison. The fs stagnated after that.
oh, you mean MurderFS?
I read « NFTs turns 30 yo ». Definitely need an exorcism.
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I read it as NFTS and was very confused for a minute.
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.
C:\Users\axexandriaanastasiachristianson\Downloads\some_git_repo\src\...You run into the file parth limit all the fucking time if you’re a developer at an organization that enforces fullname usernames.
I think I’ve spotted the real problem.
People have been talking about the real problem from the beginning of the thread: small character limit on file paths.
The limit is 32,000 characters.
That’s not an NTFS issue. That’s a Windows issue.
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn’t updated the file system in so long. They were going to with Longhorn/VIsta but that failed and it seems like they’ve been gunshy ever since.
WinFS wasn’t a replacement of NTFS as much as it was a supplement. Documents could be broken apart into atomic pieces, like an embedded image and that would be indexed on its own. Those pieces were kept in something more like a SQL database, more like using binary blobs in SharePoint Portal, but that database still was written to the disk on an NTFS partition as I recall. WinFS was responsible for bringing those pieces back together to represent a compete document if you were transferring it to a non-WinFS filesystem or transferring to a different system altogether. It wasn’t a new filesystem as much as it was a database with a filesystem driver.
NTFS has evolved over the years, but the base structure is mostly unchanged. Things have changed, but not the name. I think they’ve been using NTFS v3 for a while now…
Yeah, that’s what I mean. There have been small changes, but nothing major and if the other poster was right, even minor changes haven’t been made since 2004.
Meanwhile Apple has come out with APFS and *nix variants have multiple file systems, each more modern than NTFS.
It is weird to me. Here’s hoping reFS or some other file system comes out.
ReFS is out. But only specific revisions of Windows, notably Windows server, can use it for specific use cases.
I tried setting up ReFS on a disk for a cluster of hyper-v systems… I couldn’t because they were using a cluster shared DAS, and in that version of Windows server or ReFS there was no support for cluster access to the FS, it should have otherwise worked, it just seems a bit incomplete at the moment. If I had been using it for cifs access for a single server, then yeah, it probably would have been fine, it was just the clustered direct access that wasn’t yet supported.
Windows desktop is unlikely to get ReFS support until the fs is more mature, and it’s likely that will be limited to non-os disks for a while.
It’s pretty far along right now, it’s just that MS isn’t going to pop open any Champaign until the fs can hold its own as a direct replacement and upgrade from NTFS, with all the capabilities and features required (and more).
I’ll note that the vast majority of systems running some kind of *nix are generally using either ext2 or ext3. Where ext3 is essentially just ext2 with journaling (which is something NTFS has, AFAIK), and ext2 is just as old as NTFS.
We can argue and complain all we want, but these are tried and true, battle tested file systems that do the job adequately for the demands of systems, both in the past, and now. They do one fairly simple thing… Organizing data on disk into files and directories, and enabling that data to be written, updated, read from, and otherwise retrieved when needed.
I know in IT we don’t go by the saying “if it’s not broken don’t fix it”, since all of us have horror stories of when you don’t fix something that’s not broken and something very bad happens… But I would say that systems like ext2/3 and NTFS have achieved the coveted goal of RFC 1925, rule 12: In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
There’s no fat in these file systems. Everything in them generally exists for good reason, the fs is stable and does the required job.
Does that mean we should pack it up, we’ll never need another fs again? Absolutely not. We will hit the hard upper limits of what these file systems can do, eventually; probably fairly soon, but that doesn’t mean that either is bad simply because they are old.
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn’t updated the file system in so long.
Honest question: why? NTFS isn’t great, it isn’t terrible, it’s functional. I don’t really spend any time thinking about my filesystem. I like having symbolic links on my Linux boxes, but aside from that I just want it to work, and NTFS does.
NTFS has symbolic links as well, I use them all the time
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mklink
Not Terribly Fast System
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.
Add speed in there
NTFS is slow
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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.
I use both. I like Linux better, even more since W10. It’s spyware, crap, all those nasty things. But hey, I’m a pc gamer and, sadly enough, my games (80% of them) all get funcky in Linux (wine, playonlinux,… I tried it all), so guess I’m stuck with the crap. But again, Linux is far better and superior
When’s the last time you tried gaming on Linux? Valve has made a ton of progress with Proton in the last few years.
It’s been a few months now, so I guess I could try it again
Anticheat is still unavailable on the games I play the most, unfortunately. No warzone, no Fortnite, no Halo MCC, there’s Apex at least.
MCC works now
MCC multiplayer works on Linux now?
Yup, they updated it a few months ago.
Hot damn, here I go!
Btrfs FTW. EXT 4 is also pretty darn good. Windows is
a jokenot a good fit for my use cases and has privacy issues about many others. I just it very occasionally but mostly run Arch Linux for my needs. Windows Games are running better under WINE/Proton than native in Windows often now.The only reason why I am running Linux and Windows in dual boot is because of Valorant and the Office 365 suite. Otherwise I would already be done with Windows. Linux is just amazing.
I miss defragging…
😂😂 why?
Isn’t that the FS that constantly needs to be defragged? Do people still do that?
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How old is ext4?
XFS, the default filesystem in Red Hat, is older than NTFS. Released 1994.
I’ll say this, the previous admin of one of the Linux servers I support set up RAID-0 striping for the main data slice (must have been dropped on their head as a child or something). Two drives, and one of the drives developed bad sectors, but I was still able to recover 95% of the data before it shit the bed completely. So, XFS is apparently quite resilient, or I got lucky.
Does NTFS allow for merging of disks into a single partition? Apple was able to do this by combing a larger HDD with a smaller SSD into a single virtual HFS+ volume.
Yep. You need to convert the disk into a “dynamic disk” (no data loss btw) and then you can create a “spanned volume” across the disks. You can also create a striped volume for performance, which is basically RAID 0.
But apparently dynamic disks are now deprecated and Microsoft wants you to use “storage spaces” instead, which is basically RAID and not just simple spanned volumes. The problem with this, IIRC, is that you’ll need at least two extra drives (in addition to the drive where Windows is installed).
