MM/DD/YYYY

DD/MM/YYYY

Both of these are the wrong way to format dates.

How can I downvote you multiple times?

Aurora gets a vote from me. I set it up for my technically repulsive father, and he gets on just fine with it.

Yes, it’s a weird hill to die on. My statement is factually correct. Even if you try to harden your Windows installation with the amount of effort to payoff that’s equal to driving across the country to visit your next door neighbour, it’s a weird hill to die on.

there’s nothing Linux can offer me that Windows already doesn’t.

Well, if you really want to have that convo, I’m more than prepared for that. Aside from privacy, there’s the level of security and performance that Windows only dreams of. This isn’t an opinion, these are just facts at this point.

I do not care what you ‘think’ about it, I KNOW that.

I guess you’re the only person on the planet who does.

Why are you having an aneurism over this

Sounds like you’re the one getting worked up. I frankly don’t care what you think you know. I don’t use Windows for a whole truck load of reasons. If you want to spend hours on end modifying the OS and fighting with built-in defaults, and then convince yourself it’s secure. Then go right ahead, its no skin off my back.

But you’re definitely the one getting defensive over Windows.

Like I said, I stand by my statement. You absolutely cannot, unless you want to cut off your system from the internet or block Windows updates outright, you will be sending data to Microsoft.

This is such a weird hill for you to die on.

Please. You have no idea what my IT literacy is. The fact is that unless you install a non-standard edition of Windows, run one of the many questionable debloat scripts, make dozens upon dozens of edits to the registry, disable automatic updates, and block connections at the network/firewall level, then you will absolutely be sending boat loads of data to Microsoft.

And the second you do any updates you’ll have to make all the changes again, because Microsoft is notorious for reverting those changes.

And, after all that, you still cannot be completely sure that no data is sneaking its way back to Microsoft unless you diligently monitor all network traffic.

So I stand by my statement that the one thing Linux absolutely does, that Windows absolutely cannot, is protect your data from Microsoft.

No, you absolutely cannot, if you use Windows.

I’m using triple monitors. A 42" 4k screen. A 1080p 22". And the third is also a 1080p 22" but vertical.

No problems.

Use a separate drive for each OS.

there’s nothing Windows can’t do for me that Linux can

Linux can keep your data away from Microsoft

I just love the BTRFS features like deduplication - its great for modding large games, saves huge amounts of disk space

Now that’s a use case I hadn’t considered!

I disagree that the growing pains are steadily going down, too. Maybe I’m just old, but to me the golden age of Linux “just working” is definitely not now.

Well, you can disagree all you like, but it doesn’t line up with reality. Hell, I even have my parents on Linux and it’s working great for them. Since setting them up with Linux the amount of times I have to connect to their computer or even drive over there has gone down to nearly zero.

The thing that killed Linux getting bigger then was the lack of software support.

You actually have that backwards, but that’s neither here nor there. The reality is that Linux is more compatible than ever. Most services that anyone uses is done online in a browser. Most Steam games work out of the box, not including live-service and multiplayer games with prohibitive anticheat. Even most non-Steam games work without much fuss. Lutris makes many games a one-click installation.

it’s complete chaos.

Not really. It may seem that way, but it’s just the fast progress of tech. Frankly, Linux leads that progress because of its monopolistic use in servers.

let this be a note that the handling of third party FSs

Not going to happen, unless you want to have a chat with Microsoft.

external mounted drives in Linux should get much better

There’s no issues with external drives in Linux beyond the usual stuff every OS deals with.

Steam should start giving non-SteamOS distros some love

Steam has worked swimmingly on other distros well before SteamOS was ever a thing.

it’s to find the best FS to share across a dual boot setup

It just doesn’t exist. NTFS is proprietary and really the only choice for a Windows setup, and for Linux NTFS just isn’t a good choice. The only reason people recommend it is that it’s the path of least friction for users that comes out of the box. I’ve tried installing and using an EXT4 driver in Windows and it’s not painless process, and functionality was serviceable at best, but this was at least 5 years ago, so it might be better now.

That is not a ridiculous use case, it is not an edge case. Another self-contradicting frequent recommendation among Linux cheerleading places is to start migrating with a dual boot setup and Steam absolutely supports importing pre-existing libraries from mounted external drives.

True, but generally you would migrate your game data from a mounted NTFS drive to a FOSS filesystem.

This is an exhausting conversation every time.

Yes, the ever changing landscape of tech is exhausting. Like Windows barfing all over itself during updates (I had to reinstall my wife’s desktop just a couple weeks ago because a Windows update completely destroyed itself), which has been a regular issue for many years now. And that doesn’t even touch on the myriad of other issues Windows consistently has, nevermind all the privacy issues with Recall and ads within the OS, or OneDrive without permission uploading all user’s local documents, deleting them (edit: from the local drive), and them holding the data hostage when the OneDrive account doesn’t have enough purchased space for it all.

People insist that Linux is finally ready (it is inevitable, someone said) to take over for Windows, but when people bring up legitimate technical issues the answer is consistently that oh, well, this works fine on AMD cards, and HDR isn’t that important anyway and who needs surround sound on a PC anyway

There are always growing pains, but they are getting less and less with each release. Remember that these growing pains are a result of hardware and software makers ignoring Linux, and the reduction of pains are being tackled mostly by volunteer work. But as the userbase grows, so will support for these things and the pains will eventually go away.

If your answer is that dual boot setups just aren’t viable, then great, but that means Linux itself is not viable for a whole host of use cases

No, Linux is absolutely viable for most use cases. Dual boot setups are fine also even with mounting NTFS partitions on Linux, what you’re doing is saying “my specific use case of storing games on an NTFS partition isn’t ideal, so it doesn’t work for anyone”.

If you really insist on using it, there ARE ways to do it, but it’s an advanced setup, Take a look here (at your own risk):

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

every answer online is to “just use NTFS, it’s good now”.

The hell is it! MOST topics about using NTFS with Steam on Linux is do not use NTFS. I have no idea where you got that info from.

I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT

Just… why? Granted exFAT is more open than NTFS (did they completely open it, can’t remember, too lazy to check), but it’s also very lacking compared to other filesystems. It’s really just meant as a filesystem for removable media. Something that just about every system is capable of reading and writing to. Like a bare minimum amount of features all OSes can work with.

If you really want to try this unholy union of a setup, maybe installing an open source filesystem onto Windows would work (very slightly) better.

Now I’m in no way promising that this will work. Windows does a lot of crap at the I/I layer that complicates things, so you might still have issues. But I think it has a better chance than what you’ve already tried.

but everything I do works on Windows

Then use Windows.

You’re trying to use an open source OS with a proprietary closed-source filesystem. The reason it’s buggy is because the driver you’re using for accessing the NTFS partition is reverse engineered at a “best effort” degree. The driver isn’t complete (will never be until Microsoft open sources it), and one of the things that’s a sore point is running executables from an NTFS partition. Steam just does not handle it well and that’s not Steam’s fault or their problem to fix, nor is it Linux’s fault or their problem to fix. Frankly, it’s not even Microsoft’s fault either because they’re under no obligation to release their source code.

It’s not my problem

It’s 100% your problem.

Things that don’t work shouldn’t work a little bit and then break other stuff permanently. That’s just not a tolerable behavior for mainstream software.

You don’t use your cellphone as a hammer and complain that cellphones aren’t tough enough when the screen breaks. You don’t say “that’s just not tolerable behaviour from a mainstream consumer product”.

The solution here is to separate your Steam library between games you play on Windows and Linux. Or simply to commit to just one OS for gaming. If you choose Windows for that, that’s perfectly fine. No one is going to give you a hard time over that. You use whatever works for you.

But please understand that your whole argument here is that you created a setup that’s unstable (which is fine, I learned the hard way too), were told it’s unstable and why, then in the next breathe complained that it’s not your fault, it’s everyone else’s.

NTFS is a garbage filesystem in my opinion anyways.

I’m trying to share at least one Steam library across my Windows and Manjaro dual boot setup

Found your problem. It’s simply not going to work and will give you headaches.

Remember when he said he knows more about engineering than anyone else on the planet?

They kind of already do. The C used by the kernel team isn’t the exact same as what everyone else uses. Mainly because of the tooling they’ve built around it. I can’t remember specifics, but the tooling in place really helps out in that department.

Also, “memory safe C” is already a proposal for the C lang project.

While I mostly agree, I have used LLMs to help me find some truly obscure stuff or things a normal web search would take a long time to sift through a lot of sources that are too generalized. An LLM can give you the exact thing from a more generic search, then I can take that specific output to find the detailed source.