this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I feel you, I'm sure a lot of it comes down to familiarity. I just very recently did a fresh reinstall of windows and endeavour in a dual boot. And honestly the Calamares installer is a lot nicer than the windows one. But doing simple things like just writing to a secondary hard drive is a non-issue in windows whereas in Linux it was a whole learning adventure.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But doing simple things like just writing to a secondary hard drive is a non-issue in windows whereas in Linux it was a whole learning adventure.

What do you mean by that? Are you talking about RAID, having some partitions on separate drive or something else? Because if you mean just using secondary drive for files that's just as easy as on Windows with most distributions.
Or did you mean installing programs to secondary drive? Yeah... I have no idea how that can be done. By a quick 4 minute search it seems... that it's a problem.
So yeah, I can see a problem here. So many computers have something like 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

No, just a secondary hard drive. I use it for Windows and Linux so it's ntfs. I was just trying to save a file to it but it said I didn't have access, turns out I needed to specify ntfs-3g in the fstab file before I could write to it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

NTFS is proprietary FS that works on Linux thanks to great reverse-engineering efforts. To make this more fair, try accessing ext4 partition from Windows. Oh, it can't even recognize it. Except that ext4 is open-source, so it wouldn't even require reverse-engineering.

That said, have you fully shutdown Windows? You generally get write access out of the box nowadays, but only if Windows is fully shutdown. And clicking "Shut down" does not properly shut it down unless you disable fast startup.
Another method is to choose a "Restart" in Windows, and then instead of continuing with the restart, choose Linux on bootloader screen after you get there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I'm mostly just speaking to the process. I can right click and mount the drive without a problem, but there's no way to auto mount it on startup without editing the fstab file and finding the uuid of the drive through the terminal (at least as far as I could tell) all of the functionality is there, which is rather laudable, but the process is unapproachable for a lot of people.

O and yea, I did have to disable some fast startup setting in windows to get the write access, I forgot about that. But yeah, that one's on Windows.

edit: sorry, this was actually pretty irrelevant to what I actually said, which was just about the write access which you pointed out was a windows issue. I got mixed up with my replies.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

but there’s no way to auto mount it on startup without editing the fstab file and finding the uuid of the drive through the terminal (at least as far as I could tell) all of the functionality is there, which is rather laudable, but the process is unapproachable for a lot of people.

I haven't tested it, but gnome-disks (pre-installed in e.g.: Ubuntu and Linux Mint) does have that option:

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

ahh, that's good to know, thanks.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

ntfs is a windows filesystem, so you'd have the same problem in windows if you used a linux filesystem that isn't supported out of the box by the windows os.