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.
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.
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