Linux creator disses Leopard file system

Desk top OS usage estimation via weblog stats

From a industrial web site located in the USA:

Windows 89.5 %
Linux 4.3 %
Macintosh 3.5 %

The Linux desktop is even bigger in Europe.

Linux numbers seem to be growing rapidly after Vista was released.

While I also think Linus should take care on words (sometimes he tends to forguet who he is), the case-sensitive issues can be quite an headhache. I surely wasn't expecting this when I moved from Linux to MacOSX on my laptop. Cheers!

I do data recovery on a daily basis and I can tell you that HFS+ is just horrible. It easliy is corrupted, it seldom seems to be able to repair itself and when it does just loses data. If you have not had a problem using removable drives, trust me when I say you will. Sometimes you plug the drive in and it just will not mount or come back at all. There are many ways to fix this, but even Apple support will tell you that certain catalog errors can not be fixed, even though they look simple to me and I have a way of getting around them to get the files back, however I can still not repair them either. I just make it a null issue, get the data back and move on. When you mess with drives as much as I do, you will see why HFS+ seems unreliable. Then again, Vista pretty much messed up NTFS, so I guess everyone has their issues.

scottamoulton / myharddrivedied.com

He's right. Your article makes it sound like he's complaining about OS X 10.5, which he is definitely not. He's complaining about HFS+ etc, which indeed suck. I'm still waiting for XFS to go native in OS X.

The discussion on the 'git' list perfectly covers the flaws with HFS+. The encoding mechanisms for Unicode data that HFS+ uses lead to corrupt information - you can't always get out what you put in, and encoding approaches changed across different versions of Mac OS.

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/1/17/576170

(I expect by the third or fourth day of that discussion being dragged out they were all so sick of talking about it of course they'd outright dismiss HFS+ as crap.)

A number of you have pointed out that Linux is not that popular. Well that may be true in the Desktop market.

But the server market is a different matter. Linux has a MUCH bigger market share than Apple's XServe. One of the reasons for Linux's success in the server market is that Linux offers more advanced, more flexible and faster filesystems.

If Apple wants to compete in the server market, one of the things that Apple will need to do is REPLACE its outdated HFS+ filesystem.

Linus lost me long ago when he denounced Gnome in favor of KDE.

This dumb post (the "Leopard" filesystem is not actually the Leopard filesystem but HFS+, which has been the Mac OS filesystem since pre OS X days - You might have wanted to point that out) has finally driven me to remove this site from my feed reeder. I haven't seen a decent post from this blog in a long time.

"using their operating systems to propel more software and hardware sales."

Yes, indeed. It's called business and making money. I can imagine that Freetards have issues in comprehending the ins and outs of that paradigm.

Have you guys thought that he may be talking about the file system APIs? If so this is what he may be aiming at:

http://rixstep.com/1/1/20071106,00.shtml

"The little file system logic Apple have is not in their system itself but in an application - where it doesn't belong. Cocoa has two classes dealing specifically with file management, the one of which used to have a visual interface, but the code that should be there is not there. And in the past Apple's 'Finder' has had a number of narrow escapes, not really understanding what's going on and thwarting destructive user commands in spite of itself."

Not only is HFS+ old and slow compared to modern standards, but the file APIs all apps depend on are, lets put it politely, "quirky"... OS X is great, but instead of getting all defensive, we should be shouting about things that need improvement.