We asked our readers what they think of Windows 11's forced Microsoft account requirement, and the answer is clear. Too bad it's not on the official list of improvements coming to the OS in 2026.
It’s absolutely bananas that internal drives are not mounted automatically by standard. It’s even more bananas that it’s not easily customizable via GUI. Gnomes partitioning app can somewhat do it I believe, in KDE’s partitioning app, it was completely broken last time I tried. Either way I lost two people back to Windows because of this
Absolutely! I’ve been on Linux since 2017 and KDE Plasma since 2019-ish. It outperforms Windows even in terms of usability/ease of use in most cases. My 70+ years old, tech-illiterate parents happily use it.
But things like mounting and partitioning make me scratch my head. KDEs partitioner requires sudo rights to even start and then formats partitions in a way that you need sudo rights to access it. It’s annoying and would be very easy to fix.
While I do agree with you on principle, keep in mind that while NTFS is technically supported in Linux there can still be issues. Reading is fine, but write can still be suspect. Someone a lot more experienced than I can correct this if I’m wrong, but it is not recommended to share a drive actively between Windows and Linux due to NTFS quirks.
I mount my Windows NTFS data disk as needed in CachyOS, and will build the NAS I keep putting off for active file sharing as I spend more time on the Linux partition.
Yeah NTFS is not a great experience indeed. You can only do so much without it being open source. But I also experienced issues with mounting ext4 or btrfs. It’s not a dealbreaker for me, but it tends to irritate new users while it seems easy to fix.
Very true, not a user friendly experience at all. My only experience with setting up automatic mounting was looking into mounting my “user drive” (separate SSD that I redirect all Windows stock folder structure like Documents or Downloads to) into at the time Manjaro, and abandoning the idea after reading about NTFS write concerns and experiencing chkdsk actions in Windows every time I even just mounted it. All my ext4 or btrfs drives were created during Linux installation and mapped automatically.
Admittedly in CachyOS now I have yet to generate a chkdsk after mounting, browsing or copying data out of my NTFS user drive, so that may have been a Manjaro thing (along with breaking either itself or the bootloader ever single update). Still not risking the drive by auto mounting it or writing to it.
It’s absolutely bananas that internal drives are not mounted automatically by standard. It’s even more bananas that it’s not easily customizable via GUI. Gnomes partitioning app can somewhat do it I believe, in KDE’s partitioning app, it was completely broken last time I tried. Either way I lost two people back to Windows because of this
Yeah its not a perfect system, has some flaws, but its actual freedom from surveillance and late stage capitalism on the plus side.
Not bad for a free, modern desktop that looks stunning.
Absolutely! I’ve been on Linux since 2017 and KDE Plasma since 2019-ish. It outperforms Windows even in terms of usability/ease of use in most cases. My 70+ years old, tech-illiterate parents happily use it.
But things like mounting and partitioning make me scratch my head. KDEs partitioner requires sudo rights to even start and then formats partitions in a way that you need sudo rights to access it. It’s annoying and would be very easy to fix.
You can fix it yourself also, just add the command being run to the sudoers file and it will always run as root without needing your input.
Im sure chat gpt can give you the exact command to put in.
While I do agree with you on principle, keep in mind that while NTFS is technically supported in Linux there can still be issues. Reading is fine, but write can still be suspect. Someone a lot more experienced than I can correct this if I’m wrong, but it is not recommended to share a drive actively between Windows and Linux due to NTFS quirks.
I mount my Windows NTFS data disk as needed in CachyOS, and will build the NAS I keep putting off for active file sharing as I spend more time on the Linux partition.
Yeah NTFS is not a great experience indeed. You can only do so much without it being open source. But I also experienced issues with mounting ext4 or btrfs. It’s not a dealbreaker for me, but it tends to irritate new users while it seems easy to fix.
Very true, not a user friendly experience at all. My only experience with setting up automatic mounting was looking into mounting my “user drive” (separate SSD that I redirect all Windows stock folder structure like Documents or Downloads to) into at the time Manjaro, and abandoning the idea after reading about NTFS write concerns and experiencing chkdsk actions in Windows every time I even just mounted it. All my ext4 or btrfs drives were created during Linux installation and mapped automatically.
Admittedly in CachyOS now I have yet to generate a chkdsk after mounting, browsing or copying data out of my NTFS user drive, so that may have been a Manjaro thing (along with breaking either itself or the bootloader ever single update). Still not risking the drive by auto mounting it or writing to it.