Only recently have unix filesysetms matched and surpassed NTFS (which was built back in the very early 90s!). reisrfs, btrfs, xfs, jfs, zfs, etc. are better than NTFS in some ways, but all the "traditional" unix filesystems do not even come close (ext2/3, hfs, ufs).
Only a little bit. Microsoft has a history of half-assing a great majority of their products. Windows 7 is a great example: it's wonderful compared to everything since Windows 95, but the interface is horribly inconsistent and their are things like UAC and 9 shutdown options that drive me batty. Windows 7 still manages to crash on resume from sleep often enough I refuse to trust it.
(don't get me started on vista or IE!)
Definitely no.
> stability,
So close to 100% it's hard to measure any difference. Well... Perhaps it beats BtrFS and other experimental/unfinished products. But, again, it doesn't beat it in features.
> and performance
One thing is sure - NTFS is the fastest OS on Windows.
I clearly specify that btrfs is a better FS than NTFS. But btrfs is NOT from last generation.
It's also notable NTFS is now catching up to some features that were part of Unix-heritage filesystems since the 90's. Like symlinks and mountpoints.
And NTFS had mountpoints since Windows 2000.
Still, NTFS is catching up to other modern features like symlinks...
AFAIK, which is somewhat limited because I am not a Windows user and don't work in a Microsoft shop, NTFS has some cool features, like transactions, I don't think ext3 had. It also has compression (something that makes a lot of sense if you have more processor than disk bandwidth or space) and folder encryption. Oh.. And transactions. Did I miss something?