this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

NTFS file reading and writing is reasonably well supported under Linux, though exFAT or native filesystems are preferable. Actually finding software that will understand your files is one level removed, and getting equivalent or even the same software running is another level still. e.g. reading MS Office documents - LibreOffice is pretty good at that. For games, Steam and Proton have a lot of that covered.

If all you do is on websites, most if not all of the usual web browsers are available and work indistinguishably.

That said, I will leave you with these three words: Backups. Backups. Backups.

[–] Katana314 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not worried about interpreting the NTFS filesystem or individual files of given formats. Mainly, I'm worried about a Windows security-level problem I've had where Windows restricts access to whole directories based on user-level permissions, since the old "user" that owned them on a given operating system has been obliterated. It's an issue I've had even when reinstalling Windows to the same computer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As far as I know, Linux ignores NTFS permissions when given raw access to a disk, or rather, acts as thought it's SYSTEM or some other high-level user, working around anything Windows might have set.

Worst case, you could still move your important files to an exFAT partition (or into an archive) where permissions don't apply.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As far as I know, Linux ignores NTFS permissions when given raw access to a disk, or rather, acts as thought it's SYSTEM or some other high-level user, working around anything Windows might have set.

I think that was the case for ntfs-3g.

I'm not certain that's the case anymore with the new kernel NTFS driver, though I havent tested it. If it isn't, it should be correctly handling the file premissions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

LMDE6 still uses ntfs-3g as far as I can tell, so I'm going to assume that regular Mint does too. lsmod reports nothing like ntfs, and the tried and tested, if no longer developed, ntfs-3g suite is installed.

Things might change as and when the kernel driver is more stable for writing. I'm sure more bleeding-edge distros are already running the kernel driver, but then, those who run those distros are deep into Linux and NTFS is not really something they deal with regularly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I believe it actually is used in regular Mint (the Debian kernel doesn't include it, but it looks like Ubuntu's and Mint's do). But yes, I suppose it is still in the process of being adopted by various distributions.