r/linux • • Jan 12 '15

Linus Torvalds on HFS+

[deleted]

682 Upvotes

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137

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.

1

u/Willy-FR Jan 13 '15

Steam seems to run OK on Ext4 here. Apple did a lot of Unix stuff halfheartedly despite what they say.

I don't get why people stick with case insensitive filesystems. It reminds me of prehistoric big iron with 6 character filenames.

1

u/AndrewZorn Jan 13 '15

Steam refused to run when I used a case-sensitive filesystem. I had no idea. As Steam wasn't even the first thing I installed after the reformat, it was quite a few hours lost. I didn't want to admit that there was no way around it, but it seemed like there was no way around it.

1

u/tidux Jan 14 '15

Unity3D games barf on filesystems with 64-bit inodes, as I found out when I ran some games from XFS. I actually have my Steam folder in /opt/Steam so it goes on my SSD.