An inconvenient truth

[Bruno Medeiros]

Bruce Adams wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:52:58 +0100, Bruno Medeiros 
> <brunodomedeiros+spam at com.gmail> wrote:
> 
>>
>> This is not a perfect analogy, but when I initially met some of my 
>> programmer friends, I often ranted about Windows instability, lack of 
>> speed, and general crapness, where often the response was "use Linux" 
>> (or "use MacOS"). And yes they are all faster, more stable, and 
>> robust. But, behold, they're simply not Windows, lol! What I mean with 
>> this, concretely, is that they don't have things or behaviors that 
>> Windows has, that are not immediately noticeable but are important to 
>> me, and that due to their nature, hardly ever will have. I'm not even 
>> talking about the availability of applications or games, but, in the 
>> case of Linux, stuff like a simple, organized and terse, filesystem 
>> model. (and in the case of MacOS it's rather "An OS without the gay, 
>> please". :-P )
>>
> OT but what do you mean by a terse filesystem model? I can't think of one
> advantage of windows file systems over linuxy ones, unless you actually
> like 8.3 file names (okay that's old hat) and semantics that belong in the
> file (as in I am type X) being in the filename instead.
> The only difference I can think of is the case sensitivity. That counts as
> simpler, but certainly not more organised or terse.

No, I don't mean the capabilities of the file system itself (ie, NTFS vs 
ext3), in fact, that stuff you mentioned (8.3 filenames or case 
sensitivity are things I consider as disadvantages)

I meant rather the way the Linux filesystem is organized (ie, 
/usr,/dev,/etc, /mnt,/opt,/bin ... etc.) the way mounts have to be made, 
etc.. Without going into detail, I don't like that the OS is spread 
across several directories. I would rather all the OS data were under 
one directory only. So the default directories after installation would 
only be 3: one for the OS, one for user data, one for programs. The same 
thing can be said of programs, I really dislike the traditional unix way 
of installing programs on several different directories, one for 
binaries, one for libraries, one for documentation, one for other 
data... ugh. I also don't like the way mounting works. Even when done 
automatically, I like it like Windows, when a new unit name is assigned 
automatically (hence being able to access my data tersely, ie, in terms 
of pathnames).

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer, MSc. in CS/E graduate
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D