>>>> [ insane abuse of VFAT for multi-user systems ]
>>>
>>> You're not serious, right?
>>
>> I'm very serious. The ability to install without partitioning
>> is important for hesitant new users.
>>
>> Why not? The system might feel "unclean" to you, but it's
>> great for converting the Windows users. Not many people
>> are willing to trash their one-and-only partition, full of
>> data, to experiment with a new OS. Regular users don't
>> keep backups. Linux is the only UNIX-like OS that could
>> do a respectable job of running multi-user on vfat.
>
> The same thing can be (and is) done using initrd+loopback, with a lot
> less effort and all of the usual Unix filesystem semantics.
You don't get a shared filesystem that way. Windows would
not be able to see the files created by Linux. You'd get stuck
using the ext2 resizer all the time. You couldn't even move
a file from ext2 to vfat without having enough disk space for
it in both places.
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