
This article <https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/18/paragon_tries_to_contribute_ntfs/>, about the submission of a new Linux kernel driver for accessing Microsoft NTFS volumes (i.e. the kind of filesystems that are standard among Windows users), had me confused for a moment. It mentions limitations of the current kernel driver, like not being able to create or delete files or directories. I thought this kind of problem had been solved for Linux over a decade ago. And indeed it has, in the form of NTFS-3G, which is a userspace driver that connects via FUSE, and is available as a standard package for Debian and derivatives. I know this works, because just a few weeks ago, for example, I was at some friends’ place, and transferred several dozen gigabytes of files to an external hard drive of theirs from my Debian-Unstable-running laptop, without thinking twice about it, even though they are exclusively Windows users. I suppose a kernel driver offers higher performance, in principle, than one running in userspace. But I can’t imagine many Linux-based workloads that make heavy use of NTFS volumes.