Linux has the best filesystem ever 🙂

I’ve been in the IT industry for something like 30 years (longer if I was to include the time in my secondary education) and in that time I have used a few operating systems, starting with Apple DOS 3.3, UCSD P-System, CP/M, Acorn MOS, Macintosh System 6/7, Netware, MS-DOS, Windows (since 3.1), macOS and Linux. Obviously with the evolution of computer hardware, operating systems have evolved with better functionality, so we can’t really compare anything current with the old Apple ][ or BBC Micro Model B. However, Windows and Linux can be compared as they are both current, and Linux has definitely stood out as having the superior architecture to Windows, which reflects the former’s well designed structure and its roots in the high end mainframe computing, compared to Windows’ basic architecture derived from exclusively PC basis.

So what is important and relevant on the Linux filesystem structure are the following things:

• Linux is engineered from the ground up to allow different parts of the core filesystem to be mapped to different drives or partitions. On Windows part of the core filesystem has to be on the same partition, C drive. Hacks to move, for example, the home drive to another partition, whilst provided for in a registry key setting, will actually break the service pack or version upgrade process, and therefore can only be used by technically savvy people who can manually engineer their own updates while backing up their home partition and migrating their data to the updated version. Since Windows 10 has frequent version upgrades, it is pretty well impossible for an end user to migrate the home drive.

  Linux, on the other hand, makes it very easy to map /home to a different partition. This is a real advantage when it comes to reinstalling, because you can keep the home partition intact and just reinstall the operating system and re-use your profile. That’s another thing too – Windows will not allow you to re-use your existing profile when you reinstall. It will spew if you try to do that.

  I give my systems a SSD for OS install and put /home onto a RAID-1 hard disk array.

• In Windows your paging or virtual memory goes into a file. In Linux, swap goes into a dedicated partition by default. I suppose you can tell Windows to use only a special partition for its swap file, but the default is to put it on C drive. The issue with using a file is disk fragmentation, and potentially running out of disk space to store it, further exacerbated by being unable to relocate your home folder (see above).
• In Linux, you can spread your swap across more than one partition. This means I can simply expand my swap by adding another SSD into the system. That’s about to happen in fact, so that I can have more virtual memory available for editing large Gimp projects. Windows has no such capability; the paging file all has to be on the same partition.

And there’s a whole lot more after that, including the ability to support a whole pile of different disk formats; NTFS is pretty good but MS made it proprietary making it harder to exchange data between different types of computers.

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