Also, the file system. For the longest time windows used NTFS exclusively, which is (or was) slower than Ext4 (the most widely used on Linux).
I think MS is moving away from NTFS and are going to use a different file system in the near future (maybe even now, I don’t know anymore)
They’ve been talking about replacing NTFS for a long time. 10 years ago they put ReFS in the server builds and… show of hands anyone using it?
I think they were trying to make ReFS compete with things like zfs but 10 years later it still doesnt support compression, encryption, quotas or booting…
I don’t think NTFS is the actual problem, but the Windows VFS layer (or whatever it’s called over there).
Running windirstat (or similar programs) is dog-slow on Windows, k4dirstat eats through the same partition quite a bit faster. Getting metadata to sort a directory with what 5000 files by modification time can take minutes in explorer, with Linux it’s pretty much instant. minutes. That’s not just non-optimised that’s abysmal.
