3 ms·

Am I missing something? Hiding things from users is a property of the windows approach. Did you reply to the wrong person?

NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
GGP comment literally says that linux way is hiding file type in the binary information. If you consider that as more visible I have many questions windows at least gets an option to display file type
- nofriend 4mo ago
  Some file formats, eg png, require a particular file header in order to be considered valid. This is true regardless of your operating system, be it windows or linux. If that is hidden information, then it is hidden regardless of which operating system you're on. On windows, if I have a png named .doc, then there is absolutely no way to determine that it is a valid png and could be opened with my image viewer with standard tools. On linux it will recommend you open the file with an image viewer regardless of the file extension. That seems to me like significantly less hidden information.
  - anal_reactor 4mo ago
    > On windows, if I have a png named .doc, then there is absolutely no way to determine that it is a valid png And that's a good thing. Imagine receiving a file called "very_funny_cat.png" and Linux realizing that while it's not a valid PNG image, it is a valid ELF executable.
    - nofriend 4mo ago
      Right, linux should instead go by the normal extension for an elf, which is no extension... instead this problem is solved by prompting the user if they want to execute the program.
      - NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
        > instead this problem is solved by prompting the user it is solved by informing user how the file will be used aka file type
    - netsharc 4mo ago
      The sane option would be to change the file explorer to have a column/field of "What type of file we've detected it is". We already do this for directories. Nowadays we just rely on naming convention that the last 3 letters of the name identifies correctly what the file format is.

NooneAtAll3 4mo ago

GGP comment literally says that linux way is hiding file type in the binary information. If you consider that as more visible I have many questions windows at least gets an option to display file type

nofriend 4mo ago
Some file formats, eg png, require a particular file header in order to be considered valid. This is true regardless of your operating system, be it windows or linux. If that is hidden information, then it is hidden regardless of which operating system you're on. On windows, if I have a png named .doc, then there is absolutely no way to determine that it is a valid png and could be opened with my image viewer with standard tools. On linux it will recommend you open the file with an image viewer regardless of the file extension. That seems to me like significantly less hidden information.
- anal_reactor 4mo ago
  > On windows, if I have a png named .doc, then there is absolutely no way to determine that it is a valid png And that's a good thing. Imagine receiving a file called "very_funny_cat.png" and Linux realizing that while it's not a valid PNG image, it is a valid ELF executable.
  - nofriend 4mo ago
    Right, linux should instead go by the normal extension for an elf, which is no extension... instead this problem is solved by prompting the user if they want to execute the program.
    - NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
      > instead this problem is solved by prompting the user it is solved by informing user how the file will be used aka file type
  - netsharc 4mo ago
    The sane option would be to change the file explorer to have a column/field of "What type of file we've detected it is". We already do this for directories. Nowadays we just rely on naming convention that the last 3 letters of the name identifies correctly what the file format is.