There are probably tens of millions of people contemplating what to do with their PCs once Windows 10 goes end of life and, up until a couple of months ago, I was one of them. I had originally thought about upgrading the CPU on my 7ish year old machine to something that supported Windows 11. This, in turn, would have necessitated a new motherboard. I was estimating about £700 for it. I decided against it, partly because I nearly wrecked the motherboard fitting the heatsink when I built it, but mainly because my usage has evolved. It is to all intents and purposes a file server.

What clinched it for me was discovering that there is now full read / write support for NTFS on Linux. The last time I looked at it (probably more than a decade ago) it was read-only. This allowed me to shuffle multiple copies of data like photos while I did the install (the machine has a couple of M.2 SSDs and a fairly large HDD), and I can still use Grub to boot back into Windows for occasional emergencies.

I was really impressed with the NTFS support: it worked absolutely seamlessly… for a while. But it is a little glitchy over the longer term. I made a couple of knuckle-headed mistakes like managing to crash the default file manager on Debian (Thunar). It appears to be single-threaded for at least some operations, so trying to close its windows during file copies can have unhappy consequences.

After a while the volume auto-mount began to fail and then start working again for no apparent reason; then undeletable files started to appear in directories I was using frequently. I reiterate, this is undoubtedly down to me just not paying attention every now and then – but the warning signs were there.

It’s fine to get you over the line – so is read-only, for that matter – but I wouldn’t plan to use it for the long term.