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> Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (drive
by dale_glass 4y ago
> Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer.
Such projects have long existed, but I suspect there's a lack of interest.
It's a difficult technical problem with a narrow usage niche. You need somebody who wants both Windows and Linux, and wants to use the same physical disks. Today, why bother? You can use a NAS, cloud storage, virtualization, etc.
- leoc 4y agoWanting to dual-boot sometimes isn't that rare, surely. And local storage for documents remains popular too. It seems to reflect the reality that serious Linux development effort has been very server-focussed for a long time.
- dale_glass 4y agoThese days probably quite rare, except for gaming. Virtualization is far more convenient.
- kaetemi 4y agoYeah, if you're going to exclude the common use cases, obviously it's going to be rare. (: People still use local storage. (I'd also like native ext4 support in Windows.)
- dale_glass 4y agoYeah, but when I boot Windows for gaming, I don't care about sharing data with Linux. And given the availability of cloud storage, I can just upload whatever little I need to share.
- mst 4y agoNot all dual boot systems are "main OS" plus "wintendo." Quite a lot of the ones I encounter on personal machines are, certainly, but people doing actual dev stuff on both is still a use case.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoValve is working hard to change that.
- itsboring 4y agoUsed to dual boot, but with the combo of steam/proton and VFIO passthrough + looking glass, it’s been really solid to just run both at the same time. File sharing between the two is pretty easy in that case, because it’s just the usual rsync/scp tools or SMB share. Although, I’ve found I very rarely need the guest for gaming anymore, more so for opening the odd Photoshop file and similar tasks.
- checkyoursudo 4y agoThis is where I am at now. In 2010, used to dual boot. In 2014 or so, I switched to VFIO GPU/SSD passthrough and never booted to Windows again. In maybe 2019 or so, I pretty much stopped using passthrough even, though this is partly because I stopped playing a few games that proton didn't run (mostly because of e.g. Easy Anti Cheat, etc). I don't even have my windows ssd installed in my tower any more, that's how little I expect to need it these days.
- circuit10 4y agoVirtualisation is really laggy if you have no GPU acceleration, there are ways to get it working but they either need two GPUs or are still slower than native
- NegativeLatency 4y agoWhen I dual booted a hackintosh and windows (2015) I did so on 2 different drives so I wouldn’t have windows scribbling over my boot sector
- csomar 4y agoSure but the Linux audience is certainly not one that pays for such things. Like the Parent Poster explained, this is a hard and niche technical problem. Someone has to foot the bill for this, and apparently there is a "need" for it but no market to sell it.
- whitemary 4y agoThe Linux audience is software engineers and the companies they who employ them.
- cpach 4y agoSo why haven’t such an open source application materialized after all these years?
- KyeRussell 4y agoBack when I was a desktop Linux user, a very sizeable portion of the other people I knew that used it weren’t “software engineers”. They were ‘power users’. I don’t think that my experience was all that atypical.
- csomar 4y agoThe need is more personal than corporate.
- 4y ago
- HyperSane 4y agoWhy would I dual boot when I could use a VM?
- mmerlin 4y agoFor performance, to use the entire RAM and CPU of the bare metal machine
- nly 4y agoThe overhead of VMs, properly provisioned, is minimal these days. Even going with card passthrough just works.
- circuit10 4y agoThat doesn’t work if you have one GPU (unless you shut down the Linux desktop which defeats the point)
- mtrower 4y agoYou need a whole damn extra card for passthrough. With the price of today’s high end cards, that option seems… less than attractive.
- rezonant 4y agoLet alone trying to fit 2 3-slot GPUs in your machine, or have enough PCIe lanes to take advantage of them
- checkyoursudo 4y agoSingle GPU passthrough: https://github.com/joeknock90/Single-GPU-Passthrough https://github.com/joeknock90/Single-GPU-Passthrough
- HyperSane 4y agoFor what?
- pjmlp 4y agoFor me dual boot has ended the day VMWare and Virtual Box became good enough, that was around 2010.
- KyeRussell 4y agoI mean…using desktop Linux in the first place is already an incredibly harsh qualifier. macOS and even Windows (+ WSL) are no doubt serving the needs of many people that need a *nix environment for their work, and eating into the percentage of people that would otherwise push for Linux to be supported by their employer, or use it at home. That and the ubiquity of containerised workloads. It’s really not outside the realm of reason for the subset of those people that want to use Windows for something other than playing video games is small enough for there to not be the base level of interest needed for this stuff to get off the ground.
- Kwpolska 4y agoLinux has good NTFS drivers. If you want to dual boot and share files, you just make three partitions: Windows (NTFS), Linux (whatever the cool kids are using these days), and Shared Data (NTFS).
- wongarsu 4y agoAnd before linux had good NTFS drivers, you just put your shared data on FAT32.
- joveian 4y agoEXFAT is another option these days.
- Kwpolska 4y agoIn my experience, exFAT support in Linux is worse than NTFS support (and NTFS is more likely to be installed out-of-the-box). If you also need to support macOS, then exFAT might be an option, but exFAT lacks journalling and doesn’t scale too well due to cluster size/count limits.
- prmoustache 4y agoOn the contrary I have the feeling dual boot is a thing of the late 90's-early 2000's when processors didn't come equiped with virtualization extensions and virtualization was slow as hell. Having to reboot is so inconvenient, sooner or later ina dual boot setup you leave your non-preferred env colecting dusts and cobwebs.
- watmough 4y agoBack in the day, and I mean like mid-late 90's, you could actually install the Linux kernel, files etc., straight onto a Windows FAT partition and boot into it. Not exactly what was being asked for, but a weird old fact I'd forgotten about.
- progman32 4y agoThere was a distribution called WinLinux that did this, iirc. Installed like a normal piece of windows software. Was my first foray into unices when I was a young kid. There were some fun games in that distro!
- fdr 4y agoSometime in the early 2000s, when microarchitectural features for virtualization were rare, I used coLinux in a working capacity. It has a design was amazing at how well it worked given the constrained size of the code changes. In short, it ran a copy of Linux in supervisor mode in addition to Windows (this is the "driver mode"). At the same time. Both in supervisor mode. As a giant coroutines yielding to one another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux http://www.colinux.org/publications/Reprint-Aloni-OLS2004.pdf http://www.colinux.org/publications/Reprint-Aloni-OLS2004.pd...
- lta 4y agoA friend of mine has been using this setup for a very long time do be able to write music and work on the same station. I remember I was amazed at how solid the thing was. Does anyone know if there's a relationship between colinux and how ms eventually ended up implementing wsl ?
- fdr 4y agoNot so much. WSL1 was a too-audacious attempt to implement enough Linux-style system calls in Windows to run Linux software. Which it did surprisingly well, considering...but also, often strangely, and slowly. I think the name is a bit ironic, since the whole idea is to avoid using any Linux code in Windows, but implementing system calls so that the non-Linux parts of a Linux distribution could pretend Windows was Linux. GNU/Windows-pretending-to-be-Linux, as it were. WSL2 is virtualization-based, so it could be seen as more comparable to Docker's installation package as seen on non-Linux platforms, or Parallels: a somewhat elaborate attempt to improve the virtualization experience in interoperation with the host, e.g. setting up NAT, network file systems, or installing special drivers. I don't think coLinux offers as much as it did, now that virtualization micro-architectural features are routinely available. At least one part of coLinux that took up quite a bit of its code was special drivers to interface with the host OS. This code would still be useful and has parallels in current approaches, but the decisive trick of toggling between two kernels running in supervisor mode has less room to be useful. Also, you could only imagine the difficulty of identifying the origin of bugs in that set-up.
- Spivak 4y agoOr just using NTFS since Linux now has good support for it.
- yellowapple 4y agoThe niche surely ain't that narrow, especially as Linux-based devices like Raspberry Pis and Steam Decks grow in popularity; being able to ready EXT-formatted SD cards and such seems like it'd be valuable even from Windows.
- lasftew 4y agoIt might be convenient, but it is also more complex than just being able to read file systems. External disks or partitions containing data in particular will / should always be fully encrypted nowadays, so you'd need interoperability of disk encryption schemes as well (dmcrypt, bitlocker). NAS can handle that transparently.
- arglebargle123 4y agoNow that the new NTFS3 driver is out in the wild there's also not much need. The number of people who boot windows and need to access an ext4 partition is tiny compared to the number of people booting Linux who need to access NTFS.