Presumably Microsoft fear making it easy to swap OSes and access the same data.
"I can use Linux because if I get stuck I can just switch to Windows and still access my data" is a comfort that probably keeps people from even trying Linux (or other OSes)?
Why else would MS not support BTRFS/ZFS/Ext or whatever?
".. there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself .. Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me. .. The benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it either any more, so from a long-term stability standpoint, why would you ever want to use it in the first place?"
I definitely understand why he doesn't want to merge it in and risk potential litigation from Oracle, but I think he's kind of wrong about the rest of what he says.
I don't know what people on Solaris use, but I'm pretty sure everyone in the Linux and BSD community is running OpenZFS, which does get frequent updates and has been pretty stable as a kernel module for quite awhile. My main server in my house is running a RAID-Z2 on Linux and has been for more than six years, and I haven't really had any issues. I run scrubs regularly and things seem to work just fine.
I do wish that Oracle would give written permission to let Linux include it into the kernel, since I think it would make it easier to run ZFS on root (which I don't bother with, I just use btrfs on root and that's fine for single-drive systems, like a laptop).
> Why else would MS not support BTRFS/ZFS/Ext or whatever?
You seriously can’t think of another reason? File systems are complex. Maintenance is a huge burden. Getting them wrong is a liability. Reason enough to only support the bare minimum. And then, 99% of their users don’t care about any of those. NTFS is good enough
In my mind, in the year 2026, I don't really see the point in using a non-CoW filesystem; it would be nice if the Windows System Restore tool actually worked, and that could be achieved much simpler if there were filesystem-level snapshots.
"I can use Linux because if I get stuck I can just switch to Windows and still access my data" is a comfort that probably keeps people from even trying Linux (or other OSes)?
Why else would MS not support BTRFS/ZFS/Ext or whatever?
{I'm not saying that I think this works.}