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.

  • bjorney
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    311 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

      • @[email protected]
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        -111 months ago

        It doesn’t have issues. It just doesn’t work. You need your library on ext3/4 for the games to run on linux.

        • bjorney
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          211 months ago

          For what it’s worth I’ve never had an issue launching a game from a library on my NTFS partition