The primary slowdown factor on Windows is not the filesystem itself but Windows Defender doing its scans. Just disable it and file operations will be a lot faster.

Also the search indexer.

I don't understand how the search indexer consumes so much resources, I was able to make something faster by following the ntfs journal and just keeping a full listing of files in sqlite.

Especially considering that it's still somehow pretty bad at finding things that you know are there.

Isn't it also opening each file, to extract text, EXIF data, etc?

For me it has maybe a 10% success rate for searching strings within files. Yet it takes minutes to search for file names even when spelled exactly. Finding files by name is the primary use-case, maybe optimize for that first.

I use Everything to find stuff, so much better

Transfer times are definitely high in windows when compared to linux systems. I don't think Windows defender may affect file transfer directly.

Windows Defender has a massive impact on file transfers, especially small files. For example on my laptop with a NVMe SSD, unpacking the Golang zip file goes from seconds to minutes with Windows Defender enabled.

If that was the case, would we not expect NTFS on Linux to be better, or at least competitive with other Linux filesystems?

Not necessarily, because for that comparison to work you would need a proper NTFS driver. Does one such even exist for Linux? Looking at the Debian wiki [1] there's either a FUSE driver or a limited feature set kernel driver. Neither looks like a proper optimized "enterprise ready" driver. These work fine for accessing some files, but comparing these in a benchmark would no doubt show their weakness.

Now even if NTFS is inherently a slower architecture than ext4 or something, that does not change the fact that this difference would be minimal compared to the absolute horror show that is the Windows Defender slowdown.

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[1] https://wiki.debian.org/NTFS

OMG that's for the tip!!