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With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video

With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video chatting and online shopping. - Some software defaults to installation as sandboxed packages. Try explaining that to someone who is used to dragging and dropping files from the desktop into their programs to open them. - Want to watch a movie? Sure, but you won't get vsynced video without opening up a text editor as root to configure your graphics driver. - Ohh, your laptop has THAT particular Wifi/Bluetooth/PCI bridge/whatever chip? Sorry... - No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc". While Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has gotten a lot of flak over shoddy updates lately, things are, by and large, much more prone to breaking on Linux. And when they break, even just a little, you need to know your way around a terminal to fix them. I recently had to downgrade my kernel because of the bugs in i915. To do so, I had to first identify the problem by following the syslog and then do some heavy lifting in GRUB to lock my boot process to an older kernel version. The prerequisite knowledge to be able to perform what we might consider a simple task, has been built up during decades of me being a computer nerd. For someone without a keen interest in computers, Linux on the desktop isn't all that great. The thing is, I like it that way. I want the freedom of choice. I want the level of control it gives me. When (or if) it becomes ready for the desktop, it's probably ready to be abandoned for something else.

GordonS 7y ago
> No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc" I'm veering a bit OT here, but is anyone aware of the justification for having a case-sensitive file system? It's something that's always annoyed me about Linux and *BSD, but I wonder if there is any real benefit I've just never grasped?
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  Don’t know if it’s the real reason, but it’s bound to save a few cycles when doing string comparisons. I guess that would’ve made a difference in a multi-user system on a PDP-11.
- cesarb 7y ago
  Linux (and probably also the BSDs) goes beyond "case-sensitive": filenames are a sequence of bytes, giving special meaning only to the NUL byte (as the terminator) and the forward slash byte (as the path separator), and to the "", ".", and ".." filenames. From an implementation point of view, it's much simpler, and makes it easier to have high-performance code. Case insensitivity adds a whole set of complications. The operating system has to either canonicalize all filenames, or preserve them (case preserving) but have an equivalence class of filenames. Canonicalization can be problematic (like ß -> SS, or perhaps ß -> ẞ? And let's not think of the dotless i), and to make things worse, can change with newer versions of the Unicode standard (as new characters and their case mappings are added); at least NTFS works around that by storing a case mapping table in the filesystem metadata, so a filesystem created by a newer Windows release can have a different case mapping (and you can have different case mappings for each filesystem in the same machine). It can also confuse software: even with a case preserving system, a program can open a file named FOO for writing, and not find it later when listing the directory (because it already existed as lowercase "foo"). This kind of thing has led to security issues in the past.
- teddyh 7y ago
  The very concept of “case” is locale-dependent. To embed locale-dependent code in the file system is bad design.
- goodcanadian 7y ago
  I've always considered case sensitive file names to be a feature, not a bug. I am personally annoyed by filenames not being case sensitive in Windows. I guess that's just how my brain works. To each their own, I guess.
smcphile 7y ago
> With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video chatting and online shopping. I agree concerning word processing and especially video chatting, I much prefer using these applications on MacOS. I disagree though about online shopping, in my experience running Firefox under Linux or Windows is pretty much exactly the same.
thekyle 7y ago
As someone who has used Linux on the desktop for the last few years, I've never had the first three issues. The last one I believe is the same on macOS which I consider to be a fine desktop OS.
- arid_eden 7y ago
  macOS has always supported case-sensitive filesystems, but the default has always been case-preserving, but not sensitive. A few years ago they added case-sensitivity as a format option for HFS+, but it was still off by default.

GordonS 7y ago

> No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc" I'm veering a bit OT here, but is anyone aware of the justification for having a case-sensitive file system? It's something that's always annoyed me about Linux and *BSD, but I wonder if there is any real benefit I've just never grasped?

arexxbifs 7y ago
Don’t know if it’s the real reason, but it’s bound to save a few cycles when doing string comparisons. I guess that would’ve made a difference in a multi-user system on a PDP-11.
cesarb 7y ago
Linux (and probably also the BSDs) goes beyond "case-sensitive": filenames are a sequence of bytes, giving special meaning only to the NUL byte (as the terminator) and the forward slash byte (as the path separator), and to the "", ".", and ".." filenames. From an implementation point of view, it's much simpler, and makes it easier to have high-performance code. Case insensitivity adds a whole set of complications. The operating system has to either canonicalize all filenames, or preserve them (case preserving) but have an equivalence class of filenames. Canonicalization can be problematic (like ß -> SS, or perhaps ß -> ẞ? And let's not think of the dotless i), and to make things worse, can change with newer versions of the Unicode standard (as new characters and their case mappings are added); at least NTFS works around that by storing a case mapping table in the filesystem metadata, so a filesystem created by a newer Windows release can have a different case mapping (and you can have different case mappings for each filesystem in the same machine). It can also confuse software: even with a case preserving system, a program can open a file named FOO for writing, and not find it later when listing the directory (because it already existed as lowercase "foo"). This kind of thing has led to security issues in the past.
teddyh 7y ago
The very concept of “case” is locale-dependent. To embed locale-dependent code in the file system is bad design.
goodcanadian 7y ago
I've always considered case sensitive file names to be a feature, not a bug. I am personally annoyed by filenames not being case sensitive in Windows. I guess that's just how my brain works. To each their own, I guess.

smcphile 7y ago

> With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video chatting and online shopping. I agree concerning word processing and especially video chatting, I much prefer using these applications on MacOS. I disagree though about online shopping, in my experience running Firefox under Linux or Windows is pretty much exactly the same.

thekyle 7y ago

As someone who has used Linux on the desktop for the last few years, I've never had the first three issues. The last one I believe is the same on macOS which I consider to be a fine desktop OS.

arid_eden 7y ago
macOS has always supported case-sensitive filesystems, but the default has always been case-preserving, but not sensitive. A few years ago they added case-sensitivity as a format option for HFS+, but it was still off by default.