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Has Microsoft done away with folders in their upcoming OS? Just curious. What about the file systems of other OS's out there? It is indeed true that folders a
by webwanderings 14y ago
Has Microsoft done away with folders in their upcoming OS? Just curious. What about the file systems of other OS's out there?
It is indeed true that folders are the least efficient aspect of operating systems but it is strange that we're still holding on to them.
- danopia 14y agoWindows 8 still has folders.
- bsphil 14y agoNo. Metro is just an interface. Curious, how would an OS work with no folders? All the system files just have a "system" tag? Personally, I've learned folders. Now I have trouble thinking about a filesystem that wouldn't have them. How would you organize files on a physical disk with no file structure?
- jessriedel 14y agoYou can do away with folders in the user experience without getting rid of them under the hood. They are pretty indispensable for how software is structured.
- webwanderings 14y agoThe folders are important of course but they should be very few at the top. A system's folder and User's folder. Rest all should be tags.
- Splines 14y agoI don't know if you could call it the "least efficient" - they seem (to me) to be a simple way to understand what and where something is. Look at the problem users are having with Mountain Lion's "Save As" feature to see what could go awry once you start abstracting the user away from files.
- webwanderings 14y agoRegarding what and where something is... Let's look at two examples of most-used aspect of folders. A document file and photograph file. For me, the least efficient aspect comes with not being able to store a single document at multiple places (folders). If I have a document on Subject A written by Author B and C (two authors), than I may want to have this single document show up at multiple places, for example, the Subject A for me could be XYZ, ABC etc. The best I can do is create shortcuts of this file in a multiple folders (I shouldn't duplicate the file). So here, the tags would come handy. Now, I don't know about you but I have spent significant amount of time thinking over how to folder my photographs (and I am not a professional so not talking in GIGs). All in all, the folders are not very efficient on their own.
- greenyoda 14y agoIf they did away with folders, no existing software that was written for a prior version of Windows could possibly work -- you would need to write a new version of every program which was not dependent on folders in any way. This would be a lot of work, since all existing software looks for users' files in folders, looks for its own internal configuration files in folders, loads DLLs from paths which are lists of folders, creates folders to put itself into when it's installed, calls APIs to open files with hierarchical names, uses current and temporary directories, etc., etc. This is true for every operating system that I can think of, not just Windows.