Improved Case-Insensitive File Handling Coming To Linux 6.9

[skeevy420]

i remember having the case sensitivity argument a few decades ago on slashdot or osnews (i forget where). it was no use then, and seems like little has changed since.

there was a time that believed case sensitivity was a result of laziness from the original developers of unix. i figured that they didn't bother with taking the extra effort for attention to detail. fast forward a few years and that flaw has pretty much become so entrenched into the ecosystem that it was too difficult to address. laziness prevails, until recently.

zfs (like apple's filesystems) have a case preserve flag (that i always set when possible). it's just more natural that way. in the real world, case is not meant to change function, it's more cosmetic.

slowly but surely, things are moving in the right direction. now... if we could just fix those file permissions.

That's actually one of the primary reasons I switched to OpenZFS for my non-OS disks way back when. Windows gaming was starting to pickup some Steam on Linux and it was easier to use a file system that let me create datasets that would work with data in a way that Windows programs expected than to do the alternatives like installing games onto disk images, having a dedicated WINE disk/partition, etc.

The other primary reason is LZ4 compression. While Zstd has its uses, LZ4 is King if you have an SSD or NVMe and don't want to be artificially limited in write speed.

[lumks]

BTW NTFS is case-sensitive. Windows provides the case-insensitive abstraction but on pure NTFS you can create 2 files with the name A.A and a.a

[anarki2]

Give me ONE good case for a filesystem being case-sensitive. Where in the world would I want 2 different files with the same name (just different case) in the same directory, and more importantly, WHY?

As for this stuff: make it a mount option, then I'll use it.

[freerunner]

I used to have some NTFS partitions for my steam library in the past. Performance with the fuse driver was terrible. Reformatting them was one of the first things I did, when ext4 finally supported case-insensitivity. Performance gain could be felt at once. It's a hassle to enable it though, since it has to be changed per directory with chattr. Wish they would add an easier path. Setting a flag in fstab would be fine.