While bsdlove's comment wasn't that great, were not most Windows users not using NT until Win2k, and even then, sym & hard links weren't useful, since you needed (and continue to need¹) administrative privileges to create them?

¹excepting the recent change where a "developer mode" can be activated, but that still doesn't make them useful on an end user's machine, or to an end user.

> While bsdlove's comment wasn't that great, were not most Windows users not using NT until Win2k, and even then, sym & hard links weren't useful, since you needed (and continue to need¹) administrative privileges to create them?

To be fair it was first with Vista that Microsoft tried to seriously lock users down and keep administrative privileges far away for the common user.

I'm pretty sure most Windows 2000-users had admin rights. This was not the reason symlinks was not adopted.

Developer mode is just a place for MS to stash new beta features so they can be tried out for a longer period of time than Insider Rings are allowed. I'm willing to bet it'll be default in another release or two w/out dev mode.

Hard links and directory junctions (the sort of directory symlinks that existed before Vista) never required administrative privileges.

Well at least with hard links that's not strictly true. Using official win32 apis you need write permission on the file you're linking to so you can't link to say a system file as a non admin. Try mklink with the /H switch.

Of course that's a bit of a lie, if you use the NtSetInformationFile api you don't need write access :-)

To repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13095172

.. but not with a standard command-line tool shipping with the OS to create them. Which was kind of an odd decision.

And finally out of beta.