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by smetannik 1 day ago
Looking forward for a new NTFS driver to try. I hope this new iteration will be better than ntfs3 from Paragon.
2 comments

What is lacking in the previous one? NTFS support in linux is mostly to read and write files from windows disks, right? I think all the NTFS linux drivers - even the fuse one before the Paragon one - have been alright at that.
Ubuntu switched to the Paragon NTFS driver by default. When I upgraded to kernel 6.5 (I think) from Ubuntu, I started getting frequent kernel panics, like every day. Soon, I noticed that I couldn't even compile a Rust project on an NTFS partition because the compiler was getting random file system errors, and compiling was at high risk of causing a kernel panic. The NTFS driver in that kernel version is just totally broken. I switched to the FUSE NTFS-3G, and then I stopped getting panics and can compile stuff again no problem.

Looking at kernel commits, it looks like the driver may have been fixed since, but I'm scared to use it after it had such major brokenness in that version.

It wound up being OK, but it had a long span of time where it was virtually unmaintained and turned out to be buggy at points. The newer NTFS driver is based off of the old read-only NTFS driver which subjectively many claim is cleaner (I honestly haven't done a head to head so idk) and they're having an easier time modernizing it with support for things like large folios. Seems like a good deal to me.

Personally: I used NTFS3 and it was alright. If anything the biggest thing I got hit by was an issue where the udisks2 mount call from Dolphin would result in NTFS-3g specific flags getting sent to it, causing the mount to fail. But in actual usage it actually worked just fine for me.

The Paragon v3 NTFS driver was in perpetual beta with a scary warning about data loss whenever it was enabled.

I think users moved on when they saw no real harm in continuing to use it.

It’s good. I packaged it in my gentoo overlay and have been using it for a couple months, none of the weird issues ntfs3 had.