Not any time soon. They *really, really* should have offered NTFS as a
file system for Win95 to start weaning people off of FAT, at least for
new installs. But they did not, probably because the Win95 and NT teams
do not work very closely together and in some cases do not even like each
other. This is going to cost them big time in support costs and user
complaints, especially down the road, because VFAT does not take well to
large accumulations of files and is rather fragile compared to "real"
file systems like NTFS, HPFS, or our own ext2.
There have also been mixed signals on whether NT (i.e. the corporate
heavy-duty OS) will ever merge with Win9x (i.e. the light-duty/home user
OS). It may never happen, and even if it does it is not yet in sight.
> Isn't NTFS basically sound?
Yes, but not anything like a superset of ext2. Probably Linux can be
kludged to run on it a little more elegantly than UMSDOS. I think it
does make a great deal of sense to work hard on read-write NTFS support.
> NT supports HPFS too as I recall.... it could easily enough become the
> lowest-common denominator for cross-platform FS's. Seems like there was
> a reason NTFS was better for NT than HPFS though, HPFS didn't support
> ownership or something like that.
Nope, sorry, NT 4.0 drops HPFS support. Besides, OS/2 will run in FAT and
has a rather dubious future, unfortunately, despite being technically
better than Win95 in many ways. IBM has snatched defeat from the jaws of
victory. From the numbers I've seen, OS/2's user base is about the same
as Win95's and is now falling off; meanwhile NT probably has fewer users
than Linux but is likely to get a big boost when 4.0 *finally* comes out,
perhaps this summer.
[Meandering mode on]
In my opinion the only thing really important NT has going for it is its
ease of use. Performance is not particularly good; applications are sort
of there but are no more advanced than those of, say, Solaris 2.x; it is
less scalable than most Un*xes; and its Windows 3.1 support is limited and
not very desirable to use. It is getting most of its installed base with
people who don't want to learn Un*x and are used to Windows from the
desktop. It will be interesting to see if Caldera can make a dent...
David.Niemi@mail.li.org---niemidc@clark.net---703-904-3596---Reston, VA USA
Much of human misery derives from two overgeneralizations: if something is
good, more is always better; and what is good for me is good for everyone.