Compelling reasons to switch ? [LWN.net]

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 23, 2026 20:26 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Compelling reasons to switch ? by marcel.oliver
Parent article: Filesystem medley: EROFS, NTFS, and XFS

I experienced a very "interesting" bug that might well give a compelling reason for a more robust NTFS implementation ... But from this experience, I am very reluctant to touch NTFS from Linux in any way.

I think the second point is the right one. Having an NTFS driver is cool because it helps with interoperability with Windows systems, but that should be its exclusive use. If every system that's going to use your disk runs Linux, they should use a Linux-native filesystem. This isn't intended as a dig against NTFS, just a comment on the degree of testing the different filesystem code is likely to have.

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Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 25, 2026 18:21 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (5 responses)

Sadly, interoperability with Windows is a common use-case, and it is bidirectional. I like to archive stuff offline on removable USB HD:s, and wish them to be both readable and writable from both Linux and Windows systems. NTFS is really the only option, because Windows has no up-to-date and well-maintained implementations for any Linux file systems, and FAT just does not cut it any more with today's large files. So all work on better NTFS support in Linux is welcome.

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 25, 2026 19:12 UTC (Sun) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (4 responses)

ExFAT and UDF are two filesystems that are suitable for removable drives, and can be used to transfer large files between Linux and Windows (and macOS too.)

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 25, 2026 20:10 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

UDF looks nice in but I'm afraid it's poorly maintained - including on Windows!

exFAT is probably a better choice now.

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 26, 2026 2:08 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (1 responses)

Jan Kara maintains UDF, and I'm not aware of any outstanding problems or patches that are unduly delayed. Sure, there's not a huge flux of patches, but that's to be expected, I think.

It'd be nice if it were converted to use iomap instead of buffer_heads. If anyone's looking for a filesystem project ...

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 26, 2026 9:10 UTC (Mon) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link]

> Jan Kara maintains UDF, and I'm not aware of any outstanding problems or patches that are unduly delayed.

The main reason for not using UDF as a data exchange format is not the Linux support in my eyes, but the rather non-optimal support on other platforms. Reading from UDF works on other platforms from my experience, but in the past I've had trouble writing to UDF filesystems on Windows - sometimes it just didn't work, with no apparent reason for the failure.

UDF is nice in theory, but in practice exFAT is probably what's here to stay for simple data exchange.

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 25, 2026 20:41 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

ExFAT is not journaled, making it less suitable for something like an internal HDD/SSD that is used to store data on a dual-boot system.