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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Well, ReactOS is a reimplementation of most of Windows, including the shell and the kernel.

Anecdotally, I once installed Ubuntu + Wine for someone non-technical who broke several Windows installations by infecting them with ransomware. He used it for like half a year calling it "this strange Windows" because some people don't know what an operating system is. He eventually irreparably broke its file system because apparently he was shutting down his machine by pulling the plug while it was running.

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  shutting down his machine by pulling the plug while it was running

Well, if windows was more reliable when it comes to unexpected shutdowns then it is also partially linux's fault.

I have a similar experience as well. I have a pi server and I was trying to use an ntfs external hdd. For some reason it breaks the file system if I remove hdd or shutdown pi unexpectedly. I am not expecting there to be no data loss if i am not writing or editing a file, just doing nothing, then why FS breaks?

When that happens, I connect hdd to Windows and it is able to repair it but there is no such option in ubuntu

> if i am not writing or editing a file, just doing nothing, then why FS breaks?

For a few reasons, but the most common is that when you write a file, you 'fwrite' operation doesn't typically immediately write blocks to the disk, instead it gets written to caches that will be written to disk in due course. Changes to the disk, tables with crucial data, etc again are just updated in memory, and written to the disk at a 'sensible' time. It's possible that you aren't actively performing operations to modify the disk, but various previous changes are sitting in memory waiting to be synced. If you kill the power then these changes aren't flushed so you can end up with corruption/filesystem problems. The main reason things work this way is for performance.

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