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
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.
*nix systems are not immune to needing reboots after updates. I work as an escalation engineer for an IT support firm and our support teams that do *nix updates without reboots have DEFINATELY been the cause of some hard to find issues. We’ll often review environment changes first thing during an engagement only to fix the issue to find that it was from some update change 3 months ago where the team never rebooted to validate the new config was good. Not gonna argue that in general its more stable and usually requires less reboots, but its certainly not the answer to every Windows pitfall.
The only time you truly need to reboot is when you update your kernel.
The solution to this problem is live-patching. Not really a game changer with consumer electronics because they don’t have to use ECC, but with servers that can take upwards of 10 minutes to reboot, it is a game changer.
Seems to be sloppy engineering. We ran a huge multi site operation on Linux and did not need to.
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.
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.
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.
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Probably a gaming PC (as he mentioned Steam) without a display connected to it that’s used for game streaming using Parsec or other software like Sunshine. By the way, if you want to try that setup yourself make sure you get a dummy plug (HDMI or DisplayPort) for the GPU as Windows doesn’t really allow video capture if no display is detected.
This, thanks. I just use Steam link though, works good for my needs.
I have extra time because I don’t waste my time on making up arguments!
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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You’d think it’d be ready… Weren’t they been developing it for like a decade?
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
Furthermore, apps using the unicode versions of functions (which all apps should be doing for a couple decades now) have 32kb maximum character length paths.
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.
I think they mean the full path length. As in you can’t nest folders too deep or the total path length hits a limit. Not individual folder name limits.
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.
The limit was 260. The OS and the filesystem support more. You have to enable a registry key and apps need to have a manifest which says they understand file paths longer than 260 characters. So while it hasn’t been a limitation for awhile, as long as apps were coded to support lesser path lengths it will continue to be a problem. There needs to be an conversion mechanism like Windows 95 had so that apps could continue to use short file names. Internally the app could use short path names while the rest of the OS was no longer held back.
32k Unicode characters. No, mate, it’s not easy to run up.
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.
Not OP, but I occasionally come across this issue at work, where some user complains they they are unable to access a file/folder because of the limit. You often find this in medium-large organisations with many regions and divisions and departments etc. Usually they would create a shortcut to their team/project’s folder space so they don’t have to manually navigate to it each time. The folder structure might be quite nested, but it’s organized logically, it makes sense. Better than dumping millions of files into a single folder.
Anyways, this isn’t actually an NTFS limit, but a Windows API limit. There’s even a registry value[1] you can change to lift the limit, but the problem is that it can crash legacy programs or lead to unexpected behavior, so large organisations (like ours) shy away from the change.
Metadata is slow, messy, and volatile. Also, shortcuts are a thing.
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.
I would be pissed if they made me use such a ridiculously long login name at work. Mine is twelve characters and that’s already a pain in the ass (but it’s a huge company and I have a really common name, so I guess all the shorter variations were already taken).
The limit is 32,000 characters.
That’s not an NTFS issue. That’s a Windows issue.
That’s not even a Windows issue, that’s an issue with specific Win32 API.
I read « NFTs turns 30 yo ». Definitely need an exorcism.
I did as well. Time to find some mind bleach.
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 miss defragging…
😂😂 why?
The pretty visualization in win95 was kinda great. Really good colors. Graphic design may have peaked in 1994.
For me - It was comforting to know that I have a magic tool that I can run that makes my PC faster.
This might sound ignorant but that’s cause I am. Why doesn’t windows just use ext4, btrfs, XFS, or something open source. They wouldn’t have to worry about developing it so it’d be a load off their chest and they could get really good features that even NTFS doesn’t have. Well maybe not with ext4 but with btrfs
Microsoft really really hated open source some time ago. Now they seem to have embraced it, however some still think that might be an attempt to EEE.
Still, I suppose Microsoft doesn’t think replacing the Windows default filesystem is a sound investment at this point even if the political resistance to such a change is, supposedly, gone.
Also NTFS is constantly evolving and it’s not the same as 30 years ago.
Microsoft has a replacement called reFS but I don’t know what happened to it
It’s sorta kinda usable but not really? Its main purpose seems to be
causing permanent data corruption inISCSI storage for Veeam backup appliances.You got that right!!
It’s sort of around, but it seems to be more aimed at servers than consumer machines.
Why should they use anything else if NTFS had being great for 30 years?
idk who was dumb enough to upvote this but NTFS hasn’t been great. That’s why they’re making a replacement called reFS
there is an open source btrfs kernel driver for it and a userspace one for ext4
I read it as NFTS and was very confused for a minute.
Not Terribly Fast System
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?
How old is ext4?
15 years.
Modern Linux systems are slowly moving toward Btrfs at least… which is pretty young compared to ext4 and Ntfs.
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.
I heard rumours of Windows 12 moving away from NTFS(I assume keeping it as a legacy option).
What are they moving to?
ReFS allegedly
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).
I don’t think a spanned volume is quite what they were after. I’m pretty sure macOS uses the SSD part as a cache and it’s used mainly for increasing the performance of the relatively slow but large capacity HDD. Nowadays though you might as well just go with all SSD in most cases if performance matters.
can you boot from that ?
Using WinFs at the moment on almost all my drives. Should be the default.
Isn’t WinFS unfinished?
yea its dead I think lol
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!
