Curious, why does the filesystem matter for desktop usage?

(I ask out of ignorance, not pedantry - I'm on Windows which only allows one filesystem choice and I've never felt limited by that)

> I'm on Windows which only allows one filesystem choice and I've never felt limited by that

I'm on Windows too (because professional constraints and bad hidpi support on Linux) after 25+ years on Linux.

I cry everyday because of poor filesystem performance. Don't know if it's due to NTFS, to Windows, or antivirus stuff (Defender which is disabled most of the time). Git operations in particular are very slow.

Any filesystem on a Linux box would feel 10 times faster :(

This seems to be a known phenomenon - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/197162/ntfs-performance-...

That's looking at large numbers of files and folders, but we all know that overheads like these tend to come about due to inefficiency at the per-file level scaling up.

Also might be worth checking you've got 8.3 filenames disabled and stripped from existing files (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/josebda/windo...).

Although in general I must admit I find Linux offers better performance due to less "hidden cruft" running - perhaps the issue is background services like Windows defender (and all the other ones that don't immediately leap out) like you suggest.

Thanks, I hadn't heard about 8.3 filenames and it turns out they are activated on my laptop (somewhat recent Dell Latitude 5491). However, unlike the article you linked, I only have a C: drive and Windows won't let me change that setting easily. Will investigate further...

EDIT: finally managed to do it by tweaking a register. Weird, my filesystem already contains a mix of files with and without 8dot3names. Will monitor this in the future to see if there is an impact on FS performance.

I hadn't either, and I'm keen to see if it makes any difference on a local PC (as opposite to a large file server with huge numbers of files stored).

It strikes me Microsoft struggles with significant legacy across much of their product range, that is holding them back. Between filesystems still supporting 8.3 naming, and client links to AD seemingly assuming that clients are on trusted LAN networks (in 2021), I wonder if their backwards compatibility could be their downfall.

In a competitive market where they weren't quite so dominant, it would be interesting to see if a startup could get good enough API compatibility through WINE that they could offer a commercial "windows replacement" distribution, offering remote management via an AD-compatible interface (that can run zero-trust via SSL, the way it should be designed in 2021).

In case someone reads this (6 days later). Looks like git rebase is a lot faster now \o/

Linux mint has had working hidpi for 5 years.

Try a UHD + HD screen combo with fractional scaling an NVIDIA card and we'll talk ;)

I tried every Ubuntu release for a few years and we're not there yet. 21.04-beta now almost works except that fractional scaling makes it unusably slow.

I hear there is progress on the proprietary NVIDIA driver side. Maybe 21.10 will be the one...

I've tried approximating "Virtual Super Resolution" with xrandr and use 200% scaling to get rid of the slowdown, which would have worked if GNOME didn't keep tight grips on screen resolution/framebuffer size -- my manual changes reverted as soon as I got to the display preference panel.

Linux mint adds more quality of life features than vanilla Ubuntu. Including working HIDPI. Try it.

You said you just have Windows Defender, but for others, the big hit to FS performance is why I hate Sophos AV with a passion. IT departments though, seem to love to enforce it.

Yeah my colleagues have the approved AV forced onto them by the IT department and it seems to be much worse for them. Happily, sysadmins seem to have forgotten about me and I'm free to administer my laptop :D

That's not an argument for swappable filesystems as much as for Microsoft to get their shit together :-)

But yeah, competition could do that so point taken.

Ps. An article made the rounds on HN the other day (can't find it back) that was rather confidently suggesting that it's Defender running in every CloseHandle system call. But it's all an obtuse black box so super hard to actually find out what's going on.

To be pedantic, Windows already supports other filesystems, it's just a feature rarely used for the main disk (network filesystems and FAT memory cards are ubiquitous, of course).

And for those who wants a to live dangerously, there is even a port of ZFS: https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin

Zfs has great support for snapshots (as mentioned by others) and built-in support for encryption. In addition it handles various types of device management/raid.

Windows/ntfs has (not as good) volume management (dynamic disks) and encryption (bitlocker). But nothing like the snapshot functionality.

In addition to "regular" backups - zfs snapshots can be used in order to present historic data alongside current state.

For any new Linux (or bsd) distribution - I think you really need a special reason not to use zfs.

There's even drivers for windows, macos, bsd - so it's possible to share disks/external drives with a sane fs with encryption support between installations (not sure how stable windows/macos is though).

For dragonfly bsd, they have their own hammer fs with clustering features. For older Linux distros, xfs is well proven tech. And "ext" is of course "standard".

I still believe zfs should be the default for new desktop/server installs.

The one drawback might be memory requirements on embedded systems.

Some filesystems have features for creating snapshots of the whole of the filesystem or parts of it, and for serializing those snapshot and diffs between them in a form that allows streaming reconstruction of exact logical state elsewhere. My slightly elaborate backup/sync requirements made me a big fan of btrfs.

Some other things one may care about even on desktop are compression, corruption detection, and deduplication.

I think the most useful feature of modern filesystems (e.g. ZFS & Btrfs) relevant to desktop usage is the ability to create snapshot. Software store can automatically take a snapshot before add/remove/upgrade apps; if an upgrade causes issue (e.g. blank screen so there is no way to downgrade), just reboot and choose previous snapshot from boot entry.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/ubuntu-20-04s-zsys-a...

Zorin is based on Ubuntu, it should have ZFS support (though perhaps not in the installer).