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Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I've run into when running Adobe stuff on OS X is that it fails catastrophically on a case-sensitive filesystem. That would be the first thing to sort out; short of that I think it would be a matter of platform integration for color management, and windowing system integration (iBus, libnotify). I'm sure there's plenty more in the way of technical difficulties in porting Creative Cloud. One reason they might do it is to capture the film industry, which seems to do grading and compositing on Linux (which is why Autodesk's products in those categories support it).

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I actually reard in an HN comment that OS X's case-insensitivity by default was a choice that revolved solely around compatibility with Microsoft Office, so I think you're on to something.

> reard

Is that a combination of heard and read? I like it!

I rear you!

That sounds unlikely.

I believe case preservation but insensitivity has been in Mac OS since the original Macintosh File System; certainly it was in the Hierarchical File System and was inherited by HFS+. When they switched to OS X, they still had to maintain filesystem compatibility for the Classic system, and maintaining it for the entire OS probably made porting other Mac applications simpler as well.

I think here's the comment he was referring to[1]. You're right, case-insensitivity was introduced in HFS or earlier. Back then filenames could use any byte except ":". With HFS+ it accepted all Unicode, where case-sensitivity gets quite a bit trickier. With the later switch to OSX it would have been a great time to change the default to case-sensitive if they wanted to, but as they said, you're then betting on a few killer apps like Office and Adobe products supporting it. Office has always been notoriously slow to update and Adobe has been notoriously slow at adopting new technologies like Carbon and Cocoa. I'm sure Apple at the time was in close communication with those teams.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877431

Speaking of Autodesk, they do have SketchBook Pro, not sure they have Linux version of it.

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