I don't understand why this gets brought up. You still have to assume the filenames are encoded to something in order to display them, otherwise there would be

I don't understand why this gets brought up. You still have to assume the filenames are encoded to something in order to display them, otherwise there would be no way to display a filename other than in hexadecimal. Windows always uses UTF-16 while Linux uses the locale (which defaults to UTF-8). It's not like working with filenames on Linux is somewhat easier or more straightforward, it's certainly not.