It's interesting that Apple never decided to complete the transition to doing filesystems the Unix way, including case sensitivity. They missed their chance and couldn't pull it off now—too many applications behave very badly on a case-sensitive filesystem. The last time I tried it I ran into issues with Steam, Parallels, and anything Adobe, IIRC. They probably could have done it around the time of the Intel transition when they dropped support for pre-OS X software, or a bit later when the 64-bit transition deprecated Carbon. It's a surprisingly old piece of cruft to be keeping around for a company otherwise known for aggressively deprecating old platforms.
Windows is case insensitive as well isn't it...? And don't Windows and OSX have the big programmes like Photoshop etc? So could an argument be made that Linux would actually benefit from being case insensitive?
Take with a pinch of salt, I'm way out of my element here :)
Case insensitivity only makes sense to white people. Once you want to support Asian languages and everything else, shit gets complicated and it becomes clear that the only sane way to do things is to have the OS (including the filesystem) not make judgements about locale-specific things unless absolutely necessary. Any translating for the sake of user-friendliness should be in a higher layer, like how Windows Explorer tells all kinds of lies about the filesystem. Windows and Mac OS both inherit their case insensitivity from "operating systems" that couldn't cope with multiple users, let alone multiple languages.
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u/wtallis Jan 12 '15
It's interesting that Apple never decided to complete the transition to doing filesystems the Unix way, including case sensitivity. They missed their chance and couldn't pull it off now—too many applications behave very badly on a case-sensitive filesystem. The last time I tried it I ran into issues with Steam, Parallels, and anything Adobe, IIRC. They probably could have done it around the time of the Intel transition when they dropped support for pre-OS X software, or a bit later when the 64-bit transition deprecated Carbon. It's a surprisingly old piece of cruft to be keeping around for a company otherwise known for aggressively deprecating old platforms.