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The majority do not understand file systems, that is why. What do you NOT understand about this? Why do people keep making this comment. I like file systems, I understand them, but I used to program dos interrupts, and actually reading sectors of the drive. But I can understand filesystems, a lot of people don't. What people want is an all their photos grouped together, all the vides grouped together, all their documents together. They don't understand the different between the desktop, user folder, trash can etc... |
The fundamental ideas behind a filesystem, packaging all data in a generic container and allowing arbitrary grouping of the containers, are extremely straightforward and intuitive, not to mention incredibly useful.
What throws people for a loop is having to share their filesystem with magic invisible gremlins that leave inscrutable files all over the place. Most filesystems come pre-loaded with mountains of this junk, which the user is made keenly aware of when they are banished to some small niche directory. But the gremlins won't even stay out of the niche; they are constantly creating folders and dumping mysterious config files there, behind the user's back.
The solution to this problem is clear and simple. A filesystem, from the user's perspective, should be empty when it comes out of the box, or at most contain a few items that the user knows exactly what they are. From then and forever, nothing should ever appear in the filesystem except what the user explicitly put there. The user is free to create, move, copy, rename or delete any file without unexpected side-effects.
It seems obvious to me that filesystems should work this way and there would be no big usability issue if they did. The problem is, we have all this old baggage attached to the filesystem, both conceptually and practically, and we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.