To make backups of data on a Windows partition. Playing games residing on a Windows partition. The main purpose I can think of though is forensics (images might contain NTFS).

It's the only non-FAT filesystem with good cross-OS compatibiity.

This. Now, you've made me wonder if in the near future you could have both Windows and Linux installed on the same -gasp- partition.

I had for years. Usung Wubi.

Can't you use ext2/3 pretty much everywhere too?

To deploy Windows from WIM imeges. Windows PE isn't something one would even consider using.

I didn't know this was even possible but now I'll be looking into it. Thanks.

Why should it matter?

Why not? It's a good filesystem, why not use it?

It's kind of a garbage filesystem though.

HN gets all bent out of shape about minor differences between btrfs and zfs. Like how zfs supports raid5/6 but btrfs raid5/6 support is immature. Meanwhile NTFS doesn't even support checksumming, multiple block devices, copy on write, the performance on SSDs is garbage, etc etc.

The whole of the NT kernel was essentially a futurized implementation of VAX-VMS.

Both VMS and NT had the same manager, in the person of Dave Cutler. Microsoft hired a large team away from DEC to build NT (which became the subject of litigation from DEC).

I have read that NTFS shares common architecture with Files-11/ODS-2&5 (native VMS filesystems). Aspects were also lifted from OS/2.

ZFS was developed a decade after NTFS. Most UNIX was still on FFS when NTFS was born.

https://wikimili.com/en/Files-11

Ext2 was AFAIK a FFS-style design.

At least that 'garbage' hasn't died on me like the majority of my BTRFS partitions have. (Thankfully they all mostly still worked in read-only mode.)