I was going to mention that in my comment, but I refrained for a number of reasons: a) old non-symlink-aware Windows software will treat symlinks as hardlinks (by and large), b) it's very possible that hardlinks will be present in ReFS in one form or the other as Microsoft has a long history of using a dozen different names and implementations to create hardlink-like behavior over the years, and c) the only apps that can mishandle symlinks are those that were written with symlink support in mind, but they mangled it and did a bad job pulling that off - which, while very much lamentable, cannot be blamed on MS.
Honestly, any serious application that doesn't take symlinks into account in 2010s is a joke. Unfortunately, in the Windows world, there's a lot of them. Even hard-core backup applications (I've consulted for a few backup companies) mess this one up.
Hardlinks were the precursor to softlinks, in this day and age their only purpose is to let you say "I've given up on the software I use handling soft links properly," and while we can wish for such a feature, I don't think it's that bad of a decision to drop them.
>Honestly, any serious application that doesn't take symlinks into account in 2010s is a joke.
I agree, but it doesn't stop me from having to use these programs where they clearly kill their competitors in terms of features or usability.
Not to start a fight but windows programs take a serious step back in ease of use (for me) vs their linux counterparts. I work from home so my home PC = my work PC.
Unfortunately I'm a massive fan of multiple displays (5 currently) in various orientations and linux epicly fails at this. I used linux as my primary OS for 7 years but finally gave up over this singular issue.
Softlinks aren't just a different version of hardlinks, they have totally separate semantics. Hardlinks allow you to link multiple files without worrying if the original is destroyed, softlinks link to a file location. Take backups for example, I can have versioned backups and hardlink identical files to a previous version. The advantage of hardlinks is that I can treat the backups as fully independent, and use them with any program. If I were to use softlinks, or even deltas, I would need to use the original software to delete, or even extract the contents. With hardlinks, I can delete and copy the backups with any application. (Rsync and time machine actually implement this mechanism).
Honestly, any serious application that doesn't take symlinks into account in 2010s is a joke. Unfortunately, in the Windows world, there's a lot of them. Even hard-core backup applications (I've consulted for a few backup companies) mess this one up.
Hardlinks were the precursor to softlinks, in this day and age their only purpose is to let you say "I've given up on the software I use handling soft links properly," and while we can wish for such a feature, I don't think it's that bad of a decision to drop them.