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You usually should go with the symlinks for a normal usage. There're marginal use cases where you mount a folder, like modifying permissions, attributes, with not straight to learn tools like bindfs.
You mount a filesystem (container), whereas a folder is something contained in a filesystem (IOW, not a filesystem)
Thank You.
IOW
?
In Other Words
(Personal preference) I would symlink them as subdirectories, so not ~/Downloads but e.g. ~/Downloads/shared. This way you can unmount the NTFS drive at will, and still have a functional directory.
Thanks for the idea.
Which one is more beneficial?
(Personal preference)
So, No Difference?
It's been ages since I've mounted a working NTFS mount point but if I remember correctly, it's more finicky with I/O transactions than ext4.
As a result, I never mounted or symlinked NTFS on my home directory directly, and instead mounted it elsewhere and then saved files to that location directly.
If possible, I'd consider doing the opposite of what you're doing. Keep your home directory and then expose them using samba to your windows environment. Samba is more stable than mounting NTFS, again in my experience.
NTFS may have gotten an upgrade since I last used it (early 2010s).
But if I had to choose, I'd do symlinks since doing mount points can get messy at boot time. And you'll never run the risk of the mount not being there and then you accidentally saving something in the directory.
Thank you.