Programmer Humor

FWIW Dolphin only does it if the filesystem doesn't provide a way to add that metadata directly to the directory and you change the view configuration for that directory away from your standard configuration. Which is how the standard describes to do it. (Some file managers incorrectly add those .directory files to every directory you visit.)

A mac will add a .DS_Store file to any directory just by breathing on it.

today I learned - using Linux at home since 2005ish and I have never had an auto-file generated on any USB attached drives of mine...

the macos file browser, Finder, lets you set a background for a folder, move file icons around to arbitrary positions, other shenanigans. in order for this to work across systems on removable storage media and network mounts, they have this.

Iirc they're indexes for the system wide search feature, Spotlight

Metadata that's a holdover from the 1980s MacOS behavior. Hilariously, today, NTFS supports that metadata better than Apple's own filesystems of today. They can hide it in Alternate Data Streams.

ehthumbs_vista.db

Ah shit I've forgotten the ancient tablets, ill fix that thank you!

Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn't make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).

And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren't actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.

'A' != 'a', they are just as unequal as 'a' and 'b'

Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers' intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.

Think the other way around: What's the use case for case insensitive file names? Does it justify the effort and complexity for the filesystem and the programs to know the difference between lower and upper space chars?

Probably not. I know better then to trust the french /s

It's for local service discovery. Those services may be printers on your network, or another computer sharing music on iTunes (which is why as a Windows user you'd usually get Bonjour when installing iTunes). Or maybe it's your Raspberry Pi.

It feels iffy because it comes bundled with other software without you being asked (IIRC) and it autoruns on startup. And I mean 20 years ago when iPods were a thing and people had to use iTunes on Windows, a couple dozen megabytes of RAM really mattered too. Hell I had 512 MB back when I had an iPod (and therefore iTunes)