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Windows on Btrfs

lilysthings.org

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Re: Windows on Btrfs

#151
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but the Linux audience is certainly not one that pays for such things. Like the Parent Poster explained, this is a hard and niche technical problem. Someone has to foot the bill for this, and apparently there is a "need" for it but no market to sell it.

The Linux audience is software engineers and the companies they who employ them.

So why haven’t such an open source application materialized after all these years?

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#152

Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Surely, given the Linux native file system is open source, adding the ability to mount ext4 partitions natively should be something people can add to Windows? I have seen third party…

To your last point: try UFS! I use it for cross-platform flash drives. Better than FAT32, anyway.

I guess you’re referring to Universal Flash Storage rather than Unix File System? (:

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#153
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but the Linux audience is certainly not one that pays for such things. Like the Parent Poster explained, this is a hard and niche technical problem. Someone has to foot the bill for this, and apparently there is a "need" for it but no market to sell it.

The Linux audience is software engineers and the companies they who employ them.

Back when I was a desktop Linux user, a very sizeable portion of the other people I knew that used it weren’t “software engineers”. They were ‘power users’. I don’t think that my experience was all that atypical.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#154

Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Surely, given the Linux native file system is open source, adding the ability to mount ext4 partitions natively should be something people can add to Windows? I have seen third party…

> Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Such projects have long existed, but I suspect there's a lack of interest. It's a difficult technical problem with a narrow usage niche. You need somebody who wants both Windows an…

The niche surely ain't that narrow, especially as Linux-based devices like Raspberry Pis and Steam Decks grow in popularity; being able to ready EXT-formatted SD cards and such seems like it'd be valuable even from Windows.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#155
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Such projects have long existed, but I suspect there's a lack of interest. It's a difficult technical problem with a narrow usage niche. You need somebody who wants both Windows an…

Wanting to dual-boot sometimes isn't that rare, surely. And local storage for documents remains popular too. It seems to reflect the reality that serious Linux development effort has been very server-focussed for a long time.

I mean…using desktop Linux in the first place is already an incredibly harsh qualifier. macOS and even Windows (+ WSL) are no doubt serving the needs of many people that need a *nix environment for their work, and eating into the percentage of people that would otherwise push for Linux to be supported by their employer, or use it at home. That and the ubiquity of containerised workloads.

It’s really not outside the realm of reason for the subset of those people that want to use Windows for something other than playing video games is small enough for there to not be the base level of interest needed for this stuff to get off the ground.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#156
Regardless of how cool this is, which I truly think, won't this "break" tons of apps and tools? NTFS and (V)FAT(32) arent't case sensitive and I have seen tons of projects which will fopen file.xy regardless if the file was created as File.xy or fIle.xy or FILE.xy.... (you get the picture).

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#157

Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Surely, given the Linux native file system is open source, adding the ability to mount ext4 partitions natively should be something people can add to Windows? I have seen third party…

It's entirely due to Microsoft's hubris.

Yeah. Screw Microsoft for not supporting a file system with a rounding error desktop user base.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure there isn’t an ext4 spec, it’s just the reference implementation. Microsoft could build something that is compatible, but keeping compatibility as the reference implementation changes may not be straightforward.

The counterpoint to this is that ext4 can't change dramatically enough to cause problems without breaking compatibility with older kernels or older filesystems.

Certain features (like case-insensitivity) already do break compatibility, as I found out the hard way trying to get GRUB to boot from an ext4 filesystem with said features enabled.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#159

Too bad the article doesn't talk about performance vs NTFS. Any quick and dirty comparative benchmark would have been nice. But then again, If BTRFS had been slower than NTFS it could have been due to a suboptimal (re)implementation.

I benchmarked both with a cross platform program. btrfs is massively slower on windows, especially with random IO (but also with sequential). Its even more disparate with compression turned on both.

I cant remember the linux results... not that it matters, as I avoid NTFS writes on linux like the plague, even with the new kernel driver. Just this year, I tried trusting it for a little while, and linux ntfs killed an entire backup HDD by corrupting the partition table :/.

Mounting NTFS as read only is OK though.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#160
One life tip I've learned is that the Windwos Store's .msixbundle packages are just zip files that you can extract and usually will run fine.

Change the .msixbundle extension to .zip, and open with 7-zip. Inside the archive, open & extract the appropriate .msix file for your architecture. Now you have Windows Terminal Portable. (I've done this with other apps too)

To obtain a download link for a Windows Store package, you need to go to third party websites where you input the Windows Store URL, and it gives you the download link. Make sure the download link is from Microsoft domain.

But in Windows Terminal's case, the bundle is published on their Github so you can download directly. If you want the Cascadia Code font, you need to install it manually by double clicking on the font from the package.

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