Hi all. I’ve used Linux off and on for almost two decades now but most recently in a VM. I’m thinking I might make the permanent switch sometime before Windows 10 EOL. My concern is that I have over 12TB of data spanned across many drives, all in the NTFS file system. How is NTFS compatibility nowadays? For a time, I remember it being recommended to mount NTFS as read only. It seems infeasible to convert my current data to a Linux filesystem. Thoughts?

Edit: I don’t have time to reply to everyone but thanks for the information and discussion. I’m looking to rearrange some things on my drives to free up one drive entirely and then perhaps give Fedora Linux another spin on a secondary drive along with Windows on another. If all goes well, maybe Windows will get the boot or um never booted again.

  • jrgd@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    8 months ago

    One can comfortably use NTFS to read and write files on modern Linux distributions, but NTFS in general is not very suitable for running applications on or using for long-term usage between a dual-boot. Windows can and will often lock up NTFS partitions whenever it decides to hibernate rather than shutdown or sometimes suspend. NTFS while not being the greatest FS in general will also have worse performance on Linux than Windows. You can totally keep data stores on a Linux system, though you won’t be able to make use of many of the advanced features some Linux/BSD-oriented filesystems offer. You can totally keep your drives as they are now, though if you intend to make a full switch you should consider migrating your drives’ data over to more Linux-oriented filesystems (be it Btrfs, Xfs, or Ext4 is your choice depending on the features you want). In short, NTFS works but lacks a lot of features and performance that a more suitable filesystem would offer.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      Windows will also sometimes leave NTFS filesystems in a dirty state on shutdown and fixes them silently when it starts back up. But it you boot Linux in the meantime the filesystem will appear messed up and you’ll have to use ntfsfix if you want to mount it.

    • cygon@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 months ago

      I’ve done this (shared 3 NTFS partition in a dual boot setup) from 2017 to the end of 2023 without issues.

      The trick was to disable “fast startup” and hibernation. Otherwise Windows happily shuts down with the file systems in an inconsistent state. It’s just a question whether one can live with that in their Windows install.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      8 months ago

      Windows ext4 compatibility is awful. I have my steam library on an ext4 partition, and occasionally boot to windows for specific games that don’t work in linux. I tried mounting my ext4 partition using WSL (which worked fine), adding the steam lib folder to steam (worked fine), but all the games wanted to be verified before being run, and then i finally started one and got a BSOD. I thought maybe steam might complain that some files were wrong, but I didn’t expect that lol. But at least steam tried, Epic launcher just flat out refused.

      I haven’t tried btrfs in windows, I see WinBtrfs exists, I wonder how well it works.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
        1·
        8 months ago

        Windows doesn’t have ext4 compatibility. When you mount a Linux partition through WSL you aren’t actually mounting the drive itself, you are booting a VM up and piping all I/O through that VM back to an emulated disk device on the host windows OS

        You would be better off having your steam library on an NTFS partition - at least your Linux OS can read the drive natively