I tried Paragon's ntfs3 and it didn't go well | Hacker News Reader

I tried Paragon's ntfs3 and it didn't go well

randthoughts.github.io

20 pointsuncoaxable513 comments

Word is, IIRC, that Paragon also isn't keeping the driver updated. Doesn't seem to bode well.

That's not exactly true. From my understanding, what happened is that the maintainer for this project went on vacation in April 2022, and didn't reply to messages from the kernel team. [0]

But we can indeed see plenty of work being done by devs. [1]

So, I don't know what to think, I haven't kept with more specific stuff, but is the work done not being merged since? I couldn't tell without serious grepping.

[0]: https://lore.kernel.org/ntfs3/da20d32b-5185-f40b-48b8-298692...

[1]: https://github.com/Paragon-Software-Group/linux-ntfs3/commit...

If you find yourself spending more time in Windows, mounting Linux drives with WSL can make sense for you.

Luckily I don't need to dualboot into Linux and not tried exactly that myself, but I happily run BTRFS over loopfile as LXD storage pool in my WSL setup and heard of stories mounting ZFS disk partitions.

Doesn’t explain what the problem was with ntfs-3g, beyond it being in userspace.

>new, fast ntfs3 instead of the old, slow ntfs-3g

A performance increase had there been no issues is good reason to switch.

Is there really a good day-to-day use case for ntfs on linux though? I mean, I get needing to move some files back and forth, but having say a debian machine use a ntfs partition for /home or something just doesn't seem to make any sense really. (Which kind of makes the need for high performance vs. just working slow but reliably less important, IMHO.)

I don’t see any benchmark, btw. And some random post over the internet e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/r3cjim/kernel_updat... claims that ntfs-3g is actually faster.

Do we actually need to boot off ntfs? Otherwise, userspace is simpler to code and maintain. ntfs3 seems to support some additional ntfs features, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to leave it to userspace in this case.

If only a certain Redmond, Washington company that "loves linux" would be willing to spare a developer for this popular filesystem...

Are there really any upsides to NTFS other than it being native to Windows?

I often forget how nice APFS is until I have to use NTFS.

Upsides for whom? I believe it highly depends on who you ask and what their use cases are. Being able to shrink at all (i.e. XFS cannot) and shrink _ONLINE_ , per-directory files compression, rich ACLs - some sysadmins need those, some not, for average Joe - doesn't matter is it NTFS or something else.

The extent of Microsoft's love for Linux might be debatable, but the company certainly doesn't like NTFS: they tried to replace it with ReFS in Windows Server 2012, but that never really went anywhere.

Apparently, the NTFS source code is so insanely complicated that maintenance is a problem even within Microsoft. Due to the usual recursive kludgefest of backward compatibility requirements, a greenfield cross-platform replacement would also be more trouble than it's worth.

Similar experiences here, including performance issues. Went back to Exfat.

I read this as Polygon's nfts...too much web3 for me recently.

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