Using Quibble, an open source reimplementation of the Windows boot loader, a btrfs driver for Windows, and guest starring ntfs2btrfs, an in-place conversion tool, you can make Windows boot and run on btrfs, as Lily discovered and detailed. She took it a step further though, and decided to see if you could really redefine “cursed”.
I decided to make a new btrfs partition and just copy over all the files and see if that would boot. I was shocked to see that it did and now that I had a clean and uncorrupted filesystem it was time for the incredibly dumb idea I had.
There are no directories in the Windows and Linux roots that share the same name so you should be able to boot them both from the same partition without any file conflicts. After a reboot into Linux, installing Arch with pacstrap, and fucking with grub.
This kinda just works. The btrfs driver for Windows is incredibly solid so once you get past the bootloader there really isn’t anything weird. It just does its thing.
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Good lord.
Actually, this is a nice idea, at least when it becomes more stable.
Windows had dropped ReFS support, and only recently decided to bring it back… in the future (https://www.windowslatest.com/2023/01/24/windows-11-is-getting-a-new-file-system-refs-but-microsoft-wont-ditch-ntfs/).
ReFS is their answer to ZFS/btrfs and similar self healing file systems. Without that, even on a RAID setup, bit rot will slowly kill your data. (Remember “half puple” jpegs? or home videos randomly skipping? those are caused by bit flips, which can be detected if the filesystem has checksums, and automatically repaired if there is a replica).
Anyway, I am not sure which one will come first: stable btrfs on Windows, or ReFS returning. But, still this is a good progress.
(And those who say this could be pointless: this is also used in the ReactOS system).
While this is less useful for me these days simply on account of my having migrated off windows, this would have been quite useful when I was dual booting more regularly. It was quite annoying to have separate partitions for windows and linux.
Another problem I regularly faced when dual booting was the lack of cross platform logical volume management. The industry has refused to standardize on cross vendor/platform logical volumes, which is such a shame because logical volumes are infinitely better than partitions. Every single time I reinstalled windows or wanted to try a new linux distro or other os I faced the partitioning conundrum. It was so easy to paint oneself into a corner by failing to anticipate future requirements. There was a high likelihood of running out of space in one partition even with unused space left on the drive and you basically had to start over. Logical volumes are the obvious solution, if only they were portable. It wasn’t to be, but how useful it would have been to have industry collaboration on logical volumes between vendors in the 90s.
I’ve ones messed up a a re-partition when creating a dual or even tripple boot a long time ago. I hate dealing with stupid partition layouts as well, or at least bad ideas which seemed like a good idea at the time. Most of the time these days Windows for me ends up in VMs, where we just add extra virtual disks instead. Every disk has 1 partition.
Lennie,
I do the exact same thing.
If I were more of a gamer, I’d probably still be dual booting…
I used to work more with video, and my hardware was only supported on windows. This could give me a reason to dual boot windows on occasion, but since that old hardware is no longer supported in current versions of windows, I’ve just moved on. Dual booting an obsolete version of windows seems more trouble than it’s worth. I kept running windows 7 for a long time. I liked the OS but once MS phased it out of new visual studio runtimes, the rate at which new software broke in windows 7 rendered it very frustrating to continue using.
To be honest, regardless of your bare metal OS, VM’s make a lot of sense for when you ned xyz app that doesn’t support your boot OS. Outside of weird dedicated hardware, and graphics loads, VMs are an ideal solution. But in those cases, having a dedicated boot drive might be a more appropriate solution than trying to stuff everything on one drive.
Most games run fine on proton these days. I have a bunch of triple A titles that work just fine.
p13,
Yeah, honestly I’ve had more issues with proton than titles that explicitly support linux natively, but to be fair many games on steam are quite good with proton. I was looking for a good title to test rtx raytracing performance. I’ve tried quake2 and portal2 RTX, but I haven’t gotten to try it with anything modern. Cyberpunk 2077 comes up, but alas it’s only supported on windows and at least so far the linux directx emulation doesn’t support RT cores. Can you suggest a good modern title to show off RTX ray tracing on linux?
I love everything about this beautiful, reckless exploration of what is possible. I reminds me of the time I did an experiment to see what happens when you run the Windows 98 installer executable using Wine on Linux; surprise… you get to reinstall everything!
It should not be possible for the Win98 installer to trash Linux if run under Wine. All it can theoretically do, is wreck your Wine prefix, (which it most certainly will do), and maybe spew garbage into your home directory.
This was almost 20 years ago, so I imagine things are different now. It messed up the system enough that it wouldn’t boot. Good times.
This could make Windows Subsystem for Linux more useful.
I see what you did there…