[ryandrake]

> Not to mention that it's an obnoxious and incompetent design. Look at the fact that Mac OS litters every other computer it visits with turds, for its own (and in fact only one user's) benefit. It's doubly stupid because the next browsing Mac that comes along trounces the previous one's turd.

It also kind of reveals an underlying attitude of the OS developers: That it's OK to use the user's filesystem (particularly directories owned by the user as opposed to the OS) as their dumping ground for all this metadata. As if it's their hard drive rather than mine.

I'm OK with Apple putting whatever it wants in /System and /Library, but I'd expect the rest of my filesystem to contain only files I put there.

Same goes for you, Microsoft: You can have C:/WINDOWS and I should get the rest of the filesystem.

[jwells89]

> That it's OK to use the user's filesystem (particularly directories owned by the user as opposed to the OS) as their dumping ground for all this metadata.

There are more of this type of offender than I can possibly count that dump myriad dotfiles and dotfolders in your home folder on nixes instead of adhering to platform conventions or XDG or anything, really. Worse, these programs won't function properly if you set your home folder to be read-only (leaving subdirectories writable) to keep it clean. Drives me nuts.

[ryandrake]

Oh, yea. I didn't mean to give Linux/Unix a pass. Those systems can be equally cavalier about leaving their configuration droppings all over my filesystem, too.

[pasc1878]

The issue is where does this information go.

If in a central place what happens if the original directory is moved - how is the metadata updated. - Unix is another file somewhere, Windows can be in the registry.

With Apple it is kept with the directory.

The issue is that a directory needs some metadata and the Unix design of everything is a file does not allow the directory to include this without adding another file somewhere.

The POSIX file system is not the perfect thing.

[smallstepforman]

You really want to look at Haiku. The only sane hierarchy for desktop OS’s. Native apps respect the hierarchy, however some ported apps create garbage .files where they shouldn’t (Haiku reserves /home/config/apps/name/… for garbage). /system is read only as a bonus

[ulbu]

oh man, don’t get me started on gui applications usurping the Documents folder.