Hacker News Reader

Comment by maliker | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how people can get work done in the post-file world. Any project I've got that's more complicated than a todo list has text files, images, code, links to websites, emails, and typeset documents. The only thing that holds all that stuff, organizes it into folders, lets me edit/run it, and makes the content searchable is a filesystem. Maybe my standards for usability are too high.

View on HN

That's because the post file world is designed for consumers, not producers. YouTube creators and software programmers are still using standard computers.

It makes sense to me economically. There are probably 1000x as many consumers as prolific creators. It would be nice for casual creators on mobile devices to have better tools, and it looks like we're starting to get there with better filesystem support on iOS/Android.

It'd be nice if desktop computing went back to the nerds. Let the masses have their mobile, and let computer software not be so dumbed-down.

It seems to me that this is the clear trend. MacOS is increasingly “mobilizing” and Microsoft has already moved to a Windows-as-a-Service [0]. The only sane desktop/workstation choice is Linux and the rift grows wider every year. As the number of use cases for a workstation OS continue to diminish and the big players stop catering to that market segment, sooner or later we’ll reach the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop!

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...

even for a consumer, file synchronization is very painful without a filesystem. I usually use Resilio Sync between my devices, but I couldn't get it to work properly on an iPad without manually copying files between apps every time I wanted to update a file.

most iPhone consumers I know of are constantly complaining about their phone running out of memory from photos and whatnot, and they don't understand how to transfer between devices.

At work I am constantly battle the following sources of crufty bollocks: the ftp server, the windows-share fileserver, the 'one the linux guys use' (its ssh..), the jira ticket-attachments, the confluence 'pages', peoples mobile-phones, and so on.

If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror, without .. oh, I get it .. I just install another 3rd-party app ..

C'mon, OS vendors. Pop the cloud already.

> If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror

A local file system? UDF does the job.

>If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror...

FTP provides exactly this experience. Every platform can interface with it and it can be made network-transparent.

I've standardized on Google Drive, which kind of works. Not good enough version control features for code though, which is why I still need git. Been kicking around the idea of moving to git only, but the learning curve is steep (impossible?) for non-programmers.

Just a word of warning on Drive in particular. I received this notice the other day when trying to download one of my files from Drive:

Sorry, you can't view or download this file at this time.

Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. Please try accessing the file again later. If the file you are trying to access is particularly large or is shared with many people, it may take up to 24 hours to be able to view or download the file. If you still can't access a file after 24 hours, contact your domain administrator.

Note that this was my own file. I was the creator and I was the only downloader.

So, I guess I really didn't own it after all. That's the position that I'm going to have to recommend to anyone using any "cloud" service. If it's in the cloud, you don't own it. If you really care about it, back it up, and test your restores. Your cloud storage can disappear on a whim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com