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Windows on Btrfs

lilysthings.org

271–280 of 286 posts

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#275
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think nothing these days can perform worse than NTFS. I’ve been using Windows on my corporate issue laptop and anything that includes disk IO is a huge pain.

On Windows, I can enumerate a directory that accidentally got millions of files perfectly fine without the system itself breaking and with results being returned incrementally. On Linux/ext4, it takes an eternity for an enumeration to even start returning results and the entire OS gets stuck on IO while doing so.

True, but that's not a common enough use case to optimize for. I'd prefer Windows updates happened at the same speed Linux ones do.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#276
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way to have btrfs caps insensitive. There is no way to make NTFS case insensitive either, it being case insensitive in Windows is a Windows implementation detail.

Does that mean windows could make any file system case insensitive?

Any OS can "make a filesystem case insensitive"; for example in Linux you can do it if your kernel has support for it[1].

But again, that is a OS implementation detail thing, the underlying file system is still case preserving.

[1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#277

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…

The defacto website for downloading bundles (rg-adguard) is closed-source and hosted alongside questionable content, so I run an OSS version here: https://msft-store.tplant.com.au/

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#278
post #121
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

If there was a Linux OS focusing on desktop/laptop users that offered a highly polished user experience - comparable to the best of MacOS and Windows - I would be very happy to pay for it.

I am probably in the minority of Linux users though.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#279
post #200
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometime in the early 2000s, when microarchitectural features for virtualization were rare, I used coLinux in a working capacity. It has a design was amazing at how well it worked given the constrained size of the code changes. In short, it ran a copy of Linux in supervisor mode in addition to Windows (this is the "driver mode"). At the same time. Both in supervisor mode. As a giant coroutines yielding to one another…

A friend of mine has been using this setup for a very long time do be able to write music and work on the same station. I remember I was amazed at how solid the thing was. Does anyone know if there's a relationship between colinux and how ms eventually ended up implementing wsl ?

Not so much. WSL1 was a too-audacious attempt to implement enough Linux-style system calls in Windows to run Linux software. Which it did surprisingly well, considering...but also, often strangely, and slowly.

I think the name is a bit ironic, since the whole idea is to avoid using any Linux code in Windows, but implementing system calls so that the non-Linux parts of a Linux distribution could pretend Windows was Linux. GNU/Windows-pretending-to-be-Linux, as it were.

WSL2 is virtualization-based, so it could be seen as more comparable to Docker's installation package as seen on non-Linux platforms, or Parallels: a somewhat elaborate attempt to improve the virtualization experience in interoperation with the host, e.g. setting up NAT, network file systems, or installing special drivers.

I don't think coLinux offers as much as it did, now that virtualization micro-architectural features are routinely available. At least one part of coLinux that took up quite a bit of its code was special drivers to interface with the host OS. This code would still be useful and has parallels in current approaches, but the decisive trick of toggling between two kernels running in supervisor mode has less room to be useful.

Also, you could only imagine the difficulty of identifying the origin of bugs in that set-up.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#280
post #121
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> "Sure but the Linux audience is certainly not one that pays for such things."

Eh? People just pay for their stuff. The problem is there isn't really a market for OSes (as a consumer), period. Unless you build a PC yourself, which is not the norm, you don't usually even buy an OS.

This has nothing do with whether the linux audience pays for stuff or not...they pay fine. It is true that it is relatively niche even for linux folk to want to do this sort of thing, but that has more to do with laptop vs desktop form factors than the market. If it were a common need, I think it would be a common thing found on the market. In fact the existing ext4 stuff for Windows indeed used to be paid, but this was primarily for Windows users, Linux users have had no issue accessing ntfs drives for ages, and generally didn't really enjoy giving Windows access to their drives anyways, what with the market for viruses and whatnot...

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