This is one case where I think Windows is appropriately designed for its target audience.

It's neat that Linux has the ability to do this, but I honestly can't think of a good usecase for this. I think this is more confusing than it is useful

Windows and NTFS support case sensitive filenames. The functionality is disabled for compatibility reasons.

I can make a file named COM1 on Linux. That's on the forbidden list for Windows.

The forbidden list:

• CON
• PRN
• AUX
• CLOCK$
• NUL
• COM1
• COM2
• COM3
• COM4
• COM5
• COM6
• COM7
• COM8
• COM9
• LPT1
• LPT2
• LPT3
• LPT4
• LPT5
• LPT6
• LPT7
• LPT8
• LPT9

But why though? Do you really want a bunch of file.txt File.txt FILE.txt fIle.txt FiLe.txt FIle.txt flIe.txt… I once had a nasty bug the O in a file name was a 0 and I didn’t notice I can’t imagine the horrors this would cause.

Oh it's even better, windows explorer can't really do case sensitive

But NTFS is a case sensitive file system

This occasionally manifests in mind boggling problems

And i hate it being case sensitive

Even more annoying is that it's very cumbersome to change the case of a file once you've created it.

If you accidentally create fIle.txt when you meant File.txt, the rename function does nothing ... and it will keep displaying as fIle.txt. You have to rename it to something else entirely, then rename it back to the original name with the intended case.

thank god it's not case sensitive holy shit. i don't understand the kind of person who would see that as a positive.

To screw with Windows users, you should sometimes put a README.md as well as a README.MD in your git repos. It leads to interesting results.

Is it just me or is that more of a hinderance?

Yeah I've been using Linux for a very long time. The amount of time I've spent on the case being incorrect is non-trivial. I've gotten better at not screwing it up throughout the years but the sum of advantages is far outweighed by the sum of debugging time spent.

cd downloads

bash: cd: downloads: No such file or directory

cd Downloads

user@pcname:~/Downloads$

I'm with windows on this one. Case insensitive is much more ergonomics with the only sacrifice represented by this meme. And a little bit of performance of course. But the ergonomics are worth it imo.

Windows way is superior, in my opinion. I don't think there's a need for File.txt and fILE.txt

I find it really fucking irritating on Linux tbh. It knew what file I meant.

The android build system used that limitation of Windows to prevent android from being built on Windows. They purposely had directories with the same name but different capitalization.

The main problem with case-insensitive is that software sometimes is lazily developed: If a file is named “File.txt” and a program opens “file.txt”, then on a case-insensitive file system it will work fine. If you then format your drive to case-sensitive, the same software now fails to load the file. Source: tried case-sensitive filesystem on macOS some years ago.

Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it's just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

That's not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven't tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you're going to do do all of them. (But then, they're idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)

What I really like is a naming files with a forbidden windows character in Linux and they wont copy over to a windows partition. I end up using a question mark quite a bit for some reason.

Strictly speaking, this is a limitation of the default filesystem, and not the core operating system. If you mount a NFS share that is case sensitive, it will still be case sensitive.

The meme faces are backwards on this one.

Fun things happen whenever you upload 2 files with the same names, but differently capitalized letters to a Nas from a linux box, and then try to delete one of them from windows. It broke so hard I actually got a bsod....

This puts the win in Windows

What a tragedy. Giving files slightly different names seems far more organized and logical than having several files with the same name and different capitalization. Really seems like a non-issue to me.

EDIT: I will never simp for Windows or Microsoft, I definitely think Linux is better in many ways. But my point still stands about this specific topic.

This makes installing Skyrim mods harder because mods often contain differing versions of folder names. For example one mod might be "Scripts" and the other might be "scripts". This means you can't have Skyrim mods on Linux if you're allergic to copying files manually as this will generally make mod managers not work as well. People on forums like nexus often have a hard time even grasping the concept of not using a mod manager so it's hard to get help of any kind.