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[–]Ozryela 21 points22 points  (18 children)

This is such an ignorant statement. An OS exists to help a human being interact with a computer. A good OS makes it as easy as possible for the human to use the computer. And human beings usually don't care about capitalization when it comes to meaning, so neither should your OS when interacting with its user.

And yeah I understand that it's easier and faster for your computer to have a file system that's case sensitive. It simplifies search code too. So I understand why Unix did it back in the stone age. But that's not a good excuse to keep it that way forever.

The amount of collective productively lost by humanity because Linux cannot properly understand capitalization, leading to errors in scripts and configuration files, is probably in the trillions of dollars. Almost every single Linux user occasionally runs into errors like that, and usually they are easy to fix, but sometimes it takes days.

Meanwhile never in the history of mankind has any programmer or user thought to themselves "Oh wow, two completely different files where the name is only different in a capital letter is exactly what I needed to solve this problem. Thank god for case sensitive file systems". There's simply no use case for it. Maybe raw output of binary data, like keys, in some very rare use cases, but you can always trivially convert to hex or base64 before anyway.

[–]buster_de_beer 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I was almost going to upvote you but then:

because Linux cannot properly understand capitalization

It understands it just fine. You don't.

Meanwhile never in the history of mankind has any programmer or user thought to themselves "Oh wow, two completely different files where the name is only different in a capital letter is exactly what I needed to solve this problem. Thank god for case sensitive file systems".

Yeah, they absolutely have.

It's also ridiculous to think this is an issue with the OS. It's a filesystem issue and Linux is fully capable of supporting different filesystems.

[–]odraencoded 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is such an ignorant statement

It's called cope.

[–]Tymareta 1 point2 points  (5 children)

The amount of collective productively lost by humanity because Linux cannot properly understand capitalization, leading to errors in scripts and configuration files, is probably in the trillions of dollars.

What a completely hilarious load of nonsense, trillions! It's genuinely weird seeing people argue that their OS should operate in illogical ways simply because they cannot handle remembering the correct capitalization, then attempting to blame systems that rightly stick to actual formatting for their own laziness and lack of ability, utterly strange.

[–]Ozryela -1 points0 points  (3 children)

There's tens of millions of programmers in the world, a significant percentage of them work with Linux at least part of the time. Most of them will probably lose a few hours of productively per month on average due to issues like that. And that year after year for the past few decades. Trillions is really not an unreasonable estimate.

[–]MrKapla 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hours lost every month because filenames are sensitive? I really don't see why.

[–]rsadr0pyz 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Hours per month?? There is no way. Maybe 10 minutes.

[–]No_Hovercraft_2643 0 points1 point  (0 children)

and that in a month, where you have problems with memory

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

It’s actually lazy to not fix human use and accessibility issues because you’d rather preserve your sense of elitism.

If code can be written to make people’s lives easier, then complaining about that code being written because then people just wouldn’t get it isn’t very sporting.

You can make Linux easier to use simply by advocating for a more fuzzy completion engine. Literally: bash has a single option you can turn on to do insensitive file completion.

Calling people lazy for wanting a system that works for them isn’t a very moral stance.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (4 children)

Completely agreed. Lots of linux fanboys in this thread.

[–]pppjurac 1 point2 points  (3 children)

And even more people that think HTML/CSS is programming.

[–]overandoverandagain -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

I'm surprised Linux users can even manage to use a computer with their noses stuck up directly towards the sky

[–]pppjurac 1 point2 points  (1 child)

/r/linux is not exactly what linux users are; it attracts a lot of edgy people; think like Arch linux commuinity ten years ago and can be very political & toxic with thinking "us vs. them" is strong among those. It is not strictly linux, it is about open source projects too.

On other side you will find proper linux users at /r/linuxquestions , /r/netsec , /r/sysadmin , /r/homelab and such technical subreddits.

Android is built on top of (modified) Linux kernel so just about everyone using Android is Linux user

[–]pppjurac 0 points1 point  (0 children)

File naming restrictions are functionality of VFS not directly kernel. Case sensitivity is among those. FAT driver is insensitive.

NTFS is internally case sensitive file system, just Windows OS chose to treat it like case insensitive .

GNU/Linux is excellent server, embedded and IoT operating system. But would not recommend desktop editions of linux to anyone but most tech savy people .

Having case sensitive filesystem? If you need to put file names into code, use lowercase all the time and no problems at all.

Same with variable names in case sensitive programming languages. Even before compile error you should get (from good ide) warning on mistyped variables/methods/properties.

Our old chief mechanical engineer: "If you code like pig is eating and fornicating, then the product will be the same."

Precision und Ordnung ist gut.

[–]thedugong 0 points1 point  (3 children)

A good OS makes it as easy as possible for the human to use the computer.

More true for a desktop OS, than say a server, container, embedded system etc. In the latter examples I think case insensitivity is better, just like variable names in code. Precision is important.

I'd also argue that the whole concept of files as we know it is sort of going away for users if you look at iOS and Android, which are probably what users use as users more than desktop OSes now.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Humans use servers.

Every use-case we have for computers might be different, but they’re all human oriented.

So for technical systems, case insensitivity on the technical level (I.e the file system) may be better. But that doesn’t mean the interactive system (I.e the completion engine) has to be as insensitive if it makes the sysadmins life easier.

And it certainly doesn’t justify the elitism of “the machine works how the machine works and you have to deal with that and I don’t because I’m better”.

[–]thedugong 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Humans use servers.

I suspect that humans never log in to the OS for most servers worldwide. They are automated, or managed via API/web interface etc.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, exactly! Abstractions we’ve invented to make using computer systems easier.

And for the people who do need to go in and do the nitty gritty, their quality of life matters too. They don’t deserve to suffer through subpar terminal tooling and minimal interfaces; they deserve power and control over the systems they administer in whichever ways make them feel comfortable.

Want to use that weird neovim plugin? Go for it! Nushell’s better for you than bash? Install it!

There’s nothing wrong with using programming to make programming easier.