this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
25 points (71.2% liked)
Hacker News
1269 readers
295 users here now
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ah, I am AFK from Windows at the moment, but ping me later if I forget.
I don't remember what exactly I used, but it was at least one "Windows customizer" tool from github, and it's lobotomized to the point where I never see onedrive, copilot, any kind of Windows crap or ad ever come through. Defender is disabled, stuff like office won't work, but that's fine with me (and UWP apps work fine).
I also have it set up so linux and Windows share an NTFS partition (which you can do even on a laptop) for "common storage." Anything important goes there. So I can wipe Windows and the drop of a hat, reinstall it and not lose more than like 30 minutes lol. And Windows can't access the linux partition, so I am not to worried about security either (since anything actually valuable is done there instead).
Do NOT put all of your important stuff on an NTFS partition and let both Windows and Linux write to it.
The question won't be if your data gets corrupted, but when.
Generally linux doesn't do any writing to NTFS, at least not the way I have it set up.
Also I know exactly what you are talking about, but the kernel NTFS3 driver has gotten much better.
But has the Windows NTFS driver gotten better? That's the main concern, usually. Windows not really respecting Microsoft's own specification and assuming it's the only player on your PC.
You can set linux to write in a "windows compatible" way via a mount option.
I haven't had issues with "linux written files in windows" in a long time. Access is fine. But again, it's only for bulk storage (like media files, database files or temporary transfers): I don't use it for apps or anything.
Windows behaves well enough on its own too. Obviously NTFS isn't ideal, but the driver is stable at least.
Thank you. You describe something like what lvxferre linked (possibly while you were typing this answer) the Windows Debloat script. It looks promising.
Yes when I had dual it worked exactly as you describe, with Linux being able to read and write on Windows partition but not the other way around, which was handy. I do remember switching back and forth was a bit of a pain though, and I ended up using windows for the most part. Graphics is 80% of what I use my computer for after all.