He did say the FS sucked. My bad... :)

I'm going to get back to totally and completely enjoying my total piece of enjoyable c***. Can't wait to get an even faster piece of c*** so I can enjoy it even more :D

btw. anyone remember how often u had to run hd toolkit or nortons under sys 7/8/9 with btree and mbd errors?? talk about frustration... these days it's thoughtless (h e a v e n)

with the "control" statement.

He might need to expand on the whole "invisible" thing though.

Hardware companies can afford software development costs if it can be shown to drive (at least in part) hardware sales.

A Mac is just a glitzy PC without the OS and bundled software Apple includes with each purchase.

As has been seen, licensing the Apple OS to other hardware vendors merely serves to cannibalize Apple's hardware sales.

When/if Apple switches to another file system, will the OS be any more invisible to Linus? Probably not, but he's all over the place with his commentary (at least as far as the report on MacNN shows...Transcript anyone? >" at a Linux conference in Melbourne")

He did say all this at a Linux conference, so...

everything.

Engineers can be some of the most narrow-minded POS you'll ever have the misfortune of meeting. They can't possibly conceive that there might be another way of doing things rather than their own way.

I remember a time when people like Torvalds pissed and moaned about the GUI. The thinking was, if you're too stupid to deal with a command-line interface, you're too stupid to be allowed near a computer.

Engineers are exceedingly good at certain things, but their expertise is typically an inch wide and a mile deep.

I agree 100% and I do remember such comments from DOS and UNIX users back in the mid 80's.

...with the facts as usual. whatever it takes to glibly spit out some bile and FUD.

there is tons of OSS being used all over small, medium and enterprise business. REAL companies (not turds in basements), with coders and UI/graphic designers and business analysts, create and contribute to OSS all the live long day. bad software isn't born of the platform, it's born of bad software makers. and the windows/vb software world is as full of (if not more full of) tripe as any other segment.

you know who b****** about OSS the most? MCSEs and other correspondence-class "IT professionals". probably mostly because it hurts whenever a conversation gets too technical and the smart guys in the room can't politely hide their smirks anymore.

Linux has its strengths, as does OSX, as does Vista, as does FreeBSD, as does the Amiga OS. Seriously, anyone who still argues that their OS is "better" in this day and age is a retarded dipshit. Why do geeks continue to waste everyone's time with these OS wars instead of doing something useful or even just going outside once in a while.

Here's a clue: noone cares what OS you use. The real world will use Linux in some cases, Mac in others, and Windows in yet others. No single OS is the be-all end-all. I use the Mac as my main computer, but also manage Linux, FreeBSD and even Windows machines every day. They all have their place.

Whether it is a shortcoming of the article or a shortcoming of the rant, there is no explanation as to what the shortcomings are.

I don't think that HFS+ is perfect by any stretch, but how about something that is isn't doing for Linus. Is that too much to ask?

Maybe Linus thinks that we need to be able to choose from a limitless number of different file systems that provide different levels of robustness, completeness, speed, and quality. There are several different file systems that i can think of off the top of my head. Is Linus referring to ext2, ext3, jfs, zfs, reiser, etc...

There is nothing long in bashing a product as long as you have something to backup the bash with.

macentric

As a programmer (retired) I can honestly say that I've never met a UNIX geek who was not condescending and megalomaniacal. Ask any one of them about -any- OS other than UNIX and you'll get the "c***" answer... if they lower themselves to talk to your ignorant butt.

I think his only problem with OS X is its limited to Mac Hardware. But you know what its called choice, I have the choice to use Windows if I want gaming or to be part of the defacto world standard or I have a choice to go Apple with a controlled package that just works right, IE hardware and Software and I have a choice to go Linux too. He can kiss my a** for being so narrow minded. OS X on the software side is in my opinion the best of both worlds, you can get down to the shell, compile your stuff and be a linux boy on it or you can use it as intended by apple like a Windows machine letting the computer run itself how the Apple intended. I also don't have many complaints about HFS+, its old and dated now but it does its job, its better then NTFS anf Fat32. And you do have more file system choices with OS X kinda then Windows.

I don't think HFS+ is necessarily "c***" but it isn't exactly high tech. HFS+ has a troubled past; it was an upgrade to an already old filesystem when it came out. It was buggy when it first emerged, not endearing it to many "research types". On most benchmarks HFS+ comes in towards the bottom, and its implementation in Darwin is fairly kludgy due to everything that's been added over the years: case sensitivity, journaling, fs_events at the vnode layer, hotfile clustering...

Apple hired Dominic Giampolo away from BeOS a while back. Before he was hired by Apple, Mr. Giampolo wrote a book that slammed HFS+ over and over...and over. Pretty much every chapter was an example of "how not to do things poorly like HFS+ does". Of course, the point of the book was to promote the filesystem he wrote for Be, but many theorists/purists still consider BeFS superior to HFS+ 10 years later. The point being Apple agreed with him enough to hire him. Since being hired he added journaling to HFS+ and was the prinicpal engineer on Spotlight, which is a weaksauce implementation of the metadata capabilities that were in BeFS. But all of these are "tack ons".

I think ZFS or perhaps something entirely new, born within Apple, is the future of filesystems, but filesystem changes are not something that happen overnight. HFS+ can serve the average person just fine in the meantime. File servers...not so much, but then again, that's why we have Linux in the first place.

for OS X ever since they moved more units than he did.

Thanx for the info fubar, nicely written :)

If Linus is going to say such things which are not common knowledge, he has the responsibility to explain it. I can't just accept that the Leopard file system is c*** b/c this guy says so. So either the article missed it or Linus doesn't think he has to explain. Anyone who follows that lead is scary.

I can however say that it takes me ten times longer to figure out how to get most things to work on any flavor of Linux than it does on my Mac. Maybe Linus thinks I'm not intelligent enough but I'm actually smart enough to know that I get much faster results from a more transparent OS like OS X.

Keep in mind the original HFS+ implementation on MacOS 8 (or was it 7 or 9, who can remember) actually consisted of an HFS disk with a HFS+ image on it. Thus, when you connected to the drive in an earlier OS, you didn't get the "We can't read the disk" error, you got a Read Me file that said "This disk is formatted in HFS+". This, I'm sure, didn't help it's initial life.

The "utter c***" only refers to HFS+, and even testudo has a point - HFS+ does not look good against filesystems developed over the last 10 years, and it has hindered Apple's opportunity in the server market due to HFS+ poor performance.

Overall, OSX is the best OS out there, but it's not without shortcomings.

There are some very fanboyish responses here. Particularly from testudo ;)

Don't forget that the UI is not the operating system. So, yes, Linux is fairly invisible - you are free to change any element that you wish and still use the system. This, while not impossible, generally doesn't happen on other OSes (mostly because the prepackaged defaults are good enough to not warrant a change).

Well... doesn't anyone find it odd that you can replace an entire directory with a file in OS X? (Quickbooks update anyone?) Or that in Leopard a file, when written to, is first destroyed then a new file is created in it's place (creating another inode: you know the other way a Mac was magically able to keep track of a file despite its name changing). Or how about the fact that if had a USB device go offline while you were _moving_ a file to it, that it would be lost on both devices ('Massive data loss bug'). Or that folder copies aren't complementary (merging) but instead destroys the folder of the same name and all its contents? Has everyone been 'thinking different' so long we've forgotten there COULD be better/other ways of working with files than Apple has given us? Honestly. Can we be contemplative and not so reactionary? Thanks.

He never stated that the File system sucked or the Mach kernel sucks 'cause it is monolithic bla bla bla..

Linus ranted about the monolithic Mach kernel in 2001.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2001/04/09/mac_dev.html?page=last&x-maxdepth=0

Who cares what he said?The only linux user I know is always bleating about how superb it is - except that I get desperate requests to compile LaTeX documents because her kernel got somethinged. To the 'average' user, Linux is completely irrelevant. I'm sure it has its place, but it's not HERE on my desk. Fine, run a server on it, whatever, but it's a specialist tool, and will almost certainly remain so pretty much for ever.

So who cares what he thinks...

@that one guy: You do realize, of course, that Apple really had no practical choice other than to base OS X primarily on HFS+, right?

Even Jobs realized that it would have been suicide to make OS X and OS9 be file-system incompatible. And, say what you will about HFS+, it doesn't fragment to any real extent, and is actually quite adept at dealing with huge numbers of files.

Could the filesystem stack be teh Snappier(tm)? You betcha! But it is quite resilient to minor errors in its directory structure, and had certain features, like the Resource and Data Fork structure, and also the Type and Creator "file associations" that were not based on the far more archaic "file extension" BS that OS X is pulling the Mac community toward. These features would have taken so much time to graft onto something like EXT3, that OS X would have just come out a couple of years ago. As it is, the OS X implementation of HFS+ is a fairly well-behaved attempt to bridge the gap between MacOS "Classic" and the Unix underpinnings of the new OS.

But, moving forward, Apple was smart enough not to muck up the ability to support multiple simultaneous filesystems. This will stand them in good stead as they move away from HFS+ and toward ZFS, which is obviously their intent. But of course, everyone has to solve a few problems with ZFS, not the least of which is the inability to BOOT from a ZFS filesystem.

So, it seems a little LATE to start bashing HFS+ at this point, with Apple so clearly "telegraphing" their intent to transition to what promises to be a superdupermegacool Filesystem, namely, ZFS.

does anyone else feel that linus's comments were taken out of context? In the original article, he actually says he likes his OS X machine and vastly prefers it over Windows. The "FS is utter c***" seems to be a minor statement that the Herald reported zoomed in on, and blew way out of proportion....