[sorenjan]

I wanted to use my Raspberry Pi to share an external NTFS formatted hard drive on the network. This required installing support for NTFS, making changes in fstab to mount it with read and write privileges, installing Samba, making changes in Samba's configuration file, making a new Samba user, restarting services, and probably more that I've since forgotten about. Every step needed to be researched through a mixture of blog posts, Wikis and other online resources.

I also wanted to run a Python 3 script I'd written on a different computer. Python 3 wouldn't install through apt-get, so I downloaded and installed it myself. Various dependencies wouldn't install using pip, instead giving error messages mixed in the regular output from the install process. I don't remember the actual errors now, I gave up and ran it on a Windows desktop instead.

Sometimes Linux gets in the way of what you want to do. Sure, keep at it and you've learned something, but sometimes you want to get stuff done and don't really care about how hard drive mounting works.

I'm still a big fan of Linux and open source, but I think Windows is a fine option for Raspberry Pi 2.

[riskable]

OK so let's take your example from the perspective of a Linux user trying to use Windows 10...

So I want to share out my external ext4 filesystem from Windows 10. There are no options. I'm done.

Sure, an ext4 tool exists for Windows on x86 but it will not work on ARM. Probably won't work on Windows 10 in general anyway.

Even if I could get Windows to mount the drive I still have the hurdle of NFS (or sshfs or other options) to overcome. Windows Server 2012 ships with old school NFSv3 support but regular desktop Windows does not. That means finding and downloading a 3rd party tool.

In the past I've solved the problem by using openssh under cygwin but let me tell you: getting openssh server setup and configured in Windows, starting on boot is much harder and more complicated than getting Python 3 running on Raspbian (the latest version of which actually has Python 3 in the repos).

There's another thing I want to point out: The Python 3 problem you experienced has already been solved but I don't see the ext4 (or any other common Linux filesystem) being supported by Windows any tine soon. It won't be solved because Microsoft has no interest in interoperability and the closed nature of Windows means it is difficult for 3rd parties to solve for the rest of us.

[yellowapple]

> This required installing support for NTFS

What distro were you using? Most ship with NTFS support last I checked (though perhaps there's a higher concentration of distros without NTFS support for the RPi).

Similarly: why even use NTFS in the first place if you're doing a network share? Samba can serve files from an ext4-formatted volume to a Windows client just fine. Unless you were planning on being able to remove the drive and plug it into a Windows machine directly, there's no need to use NTFS at all.

> Every step needed to be researched through a mixture of blog posts, Wikis and other online resources.

This is true of a lot of things, no matter which operating system one uses.

Remember that Samba is designed for enterprise environments. Setting up a fileshare in such an environment with Windows is typically just as complicated (but involving a lot of graphical wizards instead of configuration file editing), since there's a lot more involved than just right-clicking the drive letter and telling Windows to broadcast it on the network.

You're right that the process for sharing files over a network with Windows hosts ought to be made more accessible for home users. Linux doesn't really have a "Homegroup" equivalent, which is unfortunate.

[sorenjan]

> why even use NTFS in the first place if you're doing a network share? [...] Unless you were planning on being able to remove the drive and plug it into a Windows machine directly

That's exactly what I was planning. Also, the drive already had data on it that was supposed to be shared.

I did not intend to start a Linux-Windows flame war, I merely pointed out that for the majority of people buying a Raspberry Pi 2 for the purpose of using it for other things that learning Linux, Windows will be an acceptable choice and in a lot of circumstances probably get out of their way more than Linux. On the other hand, I don't know how you would use the GPIO pins in Windows, but that's easy in Linux. It depends on what you're doing and what you're used to.