ReactOS Can Now Install to an NTFS Partition, With Caching, Journaling and Security Still Missing
ReactOS, the open-source Windows alternative, can now be installed directly onto an NTFS drive partition. Before this announcement, the project required users to keep a FAT32 partition around for installations. Ars Technica reports, citing Phoronix, that the move clears a long-standing hurdle for the project and brings it one step closer to finally reaching beta. The filesystem it just learned to live on is Microsoft's: NTFS is proprietary, developed by Microsoft, and traces back through the Windows NT family to 1993's Windows NT 3.1. The milestone is support, not a finished driver. ReactOS wrote that the new one still lacks caching — which causes inferior performance — along with journaling and security support, and the team warned in its announcement on X that there are still potentially undiscovered bugs.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
That caveat list is doing most of the arguing here. Caching, journaling, security: this is a driver for the machine you keep around out of curiosity, not the disk holding anything you'd mourn.
A driver with potentially undiscovered bugs is not a defect disclosure, it's a recruitment poster. The team volunteered the warning, which is roughly the opposite of how operating system milestones are usually announced.