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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

Haha wow that is so ridiculous it's awesome. Seeing both the Linux root and Windows root with Program Files living right next to usr, etc. is _wild_. Very cool hack!

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Given there's now native NTFS support in the Linux kernel, you could also do that that the other way around.

I guess that paragon driver got merged. I remember the pull request…

I wonder which direction causes more breakage for the non-native OS.

I think getting around permissions would be an issue but when I was starting on Linux I remember there was a way to install to Fat32 inside a directory in parallel with Windows 95. The distro was called Phat, so the concept is not exactly new.

Yep, just posted about this. Late 90's right?

I think it was Ygdrassil, or maybe a free distro off of a CD. Great investment of time as it got me into the oilfield doing tech support. Running Rocky 8 on a P1 Gen4 now, so come a long way from my 486/Dx2.

I suppose you could store the chmod and group/owner in an NTFS alternative data stream, or reserve a special file on the file system that acts like the MFT.

Indeed: https://gist.github.com/motorailgun/cc2c573f253d0893f429a165...

Of course you can also do a cursed setup with 2 partitions: windows on Btrfs and Linux on NTFS just to maximize the chaotic nonsense.

This is what we hoped WSL would be like, but it turned out very, very different.

Can you elaborate? It seems to me that this is exactly how WSL works. \\wsl$\<distro> provides access to the Linux filesystem

WSL 1 was mostly like this, where Linux shared the file system with Windows, albeit in a subdirectory.

WSL 2 is a completely different beast, with Linux storing its file system in a virtual disk image. \\wsl$\ just gives you the illusion of being the same system, but that’s just a networked file system.

See https://jmmv.dev/2020/11/wsl-lost-potential.html

Yeah, very unfortunate they gave up :(

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