I knowing that someone propably already asked about a similar thing, but I just have to ask. Why is there no KDE Partition Manager port for Windows systems? I like using this program, but I don’t use Linux that much.
1 Like
I’m not involved with the development of KDE Partition Manager, but I think the standard answer for this kind of question would apply here:
Because nobody has spent time and effort to port it to Windows.
As a program that interacts with low-level system functionality such as partition management, porting KDE Partition Manager to other operating systems is generally more effort than, say, a more high-level app that relies solely on existing cross-platform libraries and focuses on the GUI presentation of the library’s feature set. In this case, KDE Partition Manager is backed by a library named KPMCore, which was created with cross-platform implementations in mind, but as of now only supports Linux via sfdisk.
Other partition management backends could be added to KPMCore, but someone has to find this interesting or important enough to make it happen. With KDE being a (mostly) volunteer-driven community, Windows support will rely on at least one person taking this on as a self-assigned task.
Perhaps for partition management in general also, I’ve always been feeling safer when the program runs from a Live USB drive/image, “from the outside”, as opposed to modifying the drive while its data is currently in use by the OS that runs on top of it. And flashing a Linux-based live USB drive is always easier than doing the same thing with Windows. So even if I were primarily using Windows on a day-to-day basis, I’m still not sure if I’d have a big incentive to make a Windows version of this particular app. (Maybe that’s just me, though, and messing with an active drive in Windows is perhaps perfectly safe.)
3 Likes
In addition, there’s also the issue that Windows only supports a small Microsoft-centric set of filesystems, and I’m not even sure what (if any) functionality is provided by the OS, or Windows-based open source libraries, in terms of modifying (expanding/shrinking/relocating) filesystems and partitions. Most likely, a partition manager will be much less versatile if it lacks access to Linux’s vast built-in support for different filesystems.
It’s important to understand that KDE Partition Manager is mostly a front-end to much more complex software that deals with the actual data on a drive. It doesn’t aim to implement support for all the different ways that the data can be stored and modified. It just wants to expose functionality that already exists, in a user-friendly way. If not much partition management functionality exists on a different platform (or only as closed source) then there isn’t much that KDE Partition Manager can do to expose that functionality in the first place.
3 Likes
github.com/clapautius/bitKatalog/tree/650badf3ad749563e6a4c894ad0b506e71fc8401/src looks like the closest anyone’s ever come to this:
- It’s cross-platform; [1]
- It’s Qt-based, and the existence of a
app-kdedirectory in the linked PWD demonstrates that it was Qt-based in order to interact well with KDE’s ecosystem.
The fact that it hasn’t had a commit for 6 to 8 years demonstrates well what’s been aforestated. However, its internals should remain fairly applicable to Windows (because its low-level APIs so rarely change).