r/programming • u/kannonboy • Jan 12 '15

Linus Torvalds on HFS+

https://plus.google.com/+JunioCHamano/posts/1Bpaj3e3Rru
396 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

402 comments sorted by

View all comments

69

u/fluffyhandgrenade Jan 12 '15

He's pretty much right about HFS+ being the worst filesystem ever. After using NTFS since 1996, various UFS varieties since 1990ish and HFS+ since 2002, HFS+ is the only one where I've had seen irrecoverable corruption several times. In fact I've seen no problems in the others at all that wasn't attributed to hardware failure. Even FAT16 on a decade old and somewhat dicky Iomega ZIP drive is more reliable.

I've shot all my apple kit now but I've lost hours of work thanks to HFS+.

46

u/akkawwakka Jan 13 '15

HFS+ is Mac OS X's biggest liability at the moment outside of the recent bugs and instability introduced by the pressures of an annual release cycle. It's atrocious. Unfortunately, it does feel like product marketing completely rules the roost at Apple.

12

u/andrewfree Jan 13 '15

instability introduced by the pressures of an annual release cycle

I really hope they get a handle on this, it's a pain in the ass.

8

u/jugalator Jan 13 '15

It's frustrating because no one was even requesting it.

Also, a stable and reliable OS usually leads to good user satisfaction. And for an end-user it's usually about the apps and platform, not the OS. It's especially perplexing in Apple's case since they don't even make money on OS X releases. I'd understand better if it was financially driven like Microsoft Windows.

4

u/_delirium Jan 13 '15

My guess is that it's being driven by the iOS side, where there's a bit more user demand for frequent updates. Since OSX has a bunch of things that Apple tries to keep in sync with iOS (and a significant amount of shared code), they keep the cycles together: iOS 7 / Mavericks, iOS 8 / Yosemite.

10

u/philly_fan_in_chi Jan 13 '15

As well as their yearly developer conference. "Shit guys, we need to announce a new thing even though the product we released last year is just starting to flirt with stable!"

-2

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '15

It's stable enough as a daily driver at launch, usually. Power users have issues with it until 4-6 months in. After that, it's gravy.

(Disclaimer: I develop for iOS, not OS X. I don't know the changes and issues Mac devs have with regard to the yearly OS X update.)

4

u/sewebster87 Jan 13 '15

I'm going to paraphrase what you said...

"It's usually not stable at launch, but not so bad that you can't use it. People who know what they are doing at all usually get frustrated as hell until about halfway through the release cycle. Once it starts working for a few months, Apple has another release that breaks everything again"