Several years ago, when I'd first moved to SF, I got a scholarship to WWDC for working for ACM, and I took advantage of the opportunity to go to a Birds-of-Feather for people interested in "Darwin filesystems" or something like that. It was basically a little conference room with the FS team, and I asked, flat-out, "Why case insensitive?"

And they answered, flat-out: "Microsoft Office"

Even this past week, I was talking with coworkers about having trouble with nothing but Valve Steam on my Macs that have a case-sensitive filesystem[0]. That's particularly odd, since it works on Linux now, but that's another matter.

What I found most notable about this thread, is this quote from Linus:

"And Apple let these monkeys work on their filesystem? Seriously?"

I'm pretty sure Apple actually _fired_ anyone who wanted any of the things done anything close to any way that Linus Torvalds would agree with.

ext* not being particularly perfect, I'm happy to have both. I mean, ext2 is hard to complain about, but it comes from an era where basically all filesystems were terrible, literally the era when SGI started installing backup batteries to race with fsync().

ext4 has an alarming number of corruption bugs, but I'm sure it's not because of insane unicode handling, though I take Linus' description of how the OSX filesystem works with a grain of salt. He can't possibly _care_ to know as much about it as he knows about Linux's.

[0] achievable by formatting HFS+X in Disk Utility in Recovery Mode, then installing onto that drive