The article I'm about to link to, by Oliver Reichenstein, is pretty terrible, but it's a good way for me to bring up something I've been meaning to talk about. First, the article: "Apple has been working on its file system and with iOS it had almost killed the concept of folders - before reintroducing them with a peculiar restriction: only one level! With Mountain Lion it brings its one folder level logic to OSX. What could be the reason for such a restrictive measure?" So, where does this crusade against directory structures (not file systems, as the article aggravatingly keeps stating) come from?
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Member since:2005-08-18
Member since:2006-12-05
As a pure single-user operating system, Windows 95 didn't have shit for storing personal user files until Win95-OSR2. Windows 98, still single-user though adding kludges in an attempt to expand, finally brought the "My Documents" folder concept to Windows users who bought retail versions instead of OEM.
In Linux, the closest comparison to My Documents was... drumroll... /home. Every user (not just one, unless there is only one user set up) has their own directory to store all of their personal files, and permissions at the file system level to allow or restrict other users on the system from accessing their files.
I'm sure it was common for people to organize their home directory with documents, downloads, music, video, etc. subdirectories long before similarly-named directories have started coming with new installations of more recent distros. I used to have all of those, in lower case, before distros started conveniently adding them by default while screwing things up and making the first letter capital (certainly not optimal on an OS whose file system fully respects the capitalization of file names and has a nice command line interface). I personally preferred it when my home directory came clean on a freshly installed system, so I didn't have to later clean it up by nuking the caps.
Member since:
2008-06-19
Actually Windows does have a single virtual file system, you just don't usually see it. You can also mount drives as folders without drive letters in Windows.
As for your example of /home/user/music etc. Where do you think that came from in Linux?! Hint - it wasn't there in Redhat 6 but it was there in Windows 95!