>It's far more generic but also practically useless for an end-user.
Do end-users really mess with partitioning usually (outside of formatting brand new disks I suppose)? I'm not asking rhetorically, I suppose there must be a use case if MS implemented this (tricky) feature but I can't really imagine any of my non-techies friends and relative decide to shrink a partition (actually most of them probably aren't aware of the concept of partition in the first place).
Replacing your hard drive by a larger one, duplicate partitions and then resize them is very common in the windows end user world, including with root partition (eg replace by a ssd, or a larger ssd). There are lots of paid tools to help do that, notably the duplicate part.
Now personnaly I find it weird, I would rather use the excuse to wipe and start clean if root, and for non root just making the partition you want and copy the content instead feels cleaner, but is it fairly common nonetheless.
They indeed don't know the concept of partitions, but they google "replace my hard drive by a larger one" and follow a guide usually (and such guide contains link to a specific duplicate took they can buy, of course).
"End-user" is not a synonym for "layman". Are you a developer? Do you work on your laptop? Great, you're an end-user.
More generally, I was trying to approximate "the set of users who aren't solely sysadmins of remote systems". Substitute for it whatever word you see fit.
I fully expect a developer to be able to follow the instructions given in the post then. It's not more complicated than your average framework or build system.
> I fully expect a developer to be able to follow the instructions given in the post then. It's not more complicated than your average framework or build system.
And I never suggested a developer would be incapable of following these. Seems like you got so sidetracked in arguing that you forgot what the discussion was actually about. See my original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19357672
I recently installed ubuntu and there was no warning that the previous (many years ago) functionality of a default swap sized large enough to allow for hibernation was no longer the case. I installed using defaults without much thought because of course why wouldn't hibernation be possible using the default. Now I want to resize my partitions.
Do end-users really mess with partitioning usually (outside of formatting brand new disks I suppose)? I'm not asking rhetorically, I suppose there must be a use case if MS implemented this (tricky) feature but I can't really imagine any of my non-techies friends and relative decide to shrink a partition (actually most of them probably aren't aware of the concept of partition in the first place).