Windows doesn’t have it at the file system layer, NTFS is case sensitive. Windows has it at the Win32 subsystem layer, see replies and comments here:

https://superuser.com/questions/364057/

> Windows doesn’t have it at the file system layer, NTFS is case sensitive.

I think the common phrasing is "case-aware, not case-sensitive".

No, NTFS has always been at least optionally case sensitive; current Windows versions even allow case-sensitivity to be controlled on a per-directory basis[1], which even works for (some) Win32 programs:

  Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22631.3593]
  (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
  
  C:\Users\jtm>mkdir foo
  
  C:\Users\jtm>fsutil file setCaseSensitiveInfo foo
  Case sensitive attribute on directory C:\Users\jtm\foo is enabled.
  
  C:\Users\jtm>echo bar > foo\bar.txt
  
  C:\Users\jtm>echo Bar > foo\Bar.txt
  
  C:\Users\jtm>dir foo
   Volume in drive C is Aristotle-Win
   Volume Serial Number is E4AE-428B
  
   Directory of C:\Users\jtm\foo
  
  2024-05-31  17:55    <DIR>          .
  2024-05-31  17:55    <DIR>          ..
  2024-05-31  17:55                 6 Bar.txt
  2024-05-31  17:55                 6 bar.txt
                 2 File(s)             12 bytes
                 2 Dir(s)  41,524,133,888 bytes free
  
  C:\Users\jtm>type foo\bar.txt
  bar
  
  C:\Users\jtm>type foo\Bar.txt
  Bar

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/case-sensitivi...

That's way worse than just putting it on the file system.

Now you have hidden information, that you can't ever change, and may or may not impact whatever you are doing.

What hidden information that you can't ever change?

I think what they mean is if you somehow had two files with the same name but different cases (as NTFS supports this) it would be impossible to fix with win32 calls

You look from technical perspective. From average person perspective, even files are too much technicality to deal with.

As a user I want my work to be preserved, I want to view my photos and I want system to know where is my funny foto of my dog I did last Christmas.

As a developer I need an identifier for a resource and I am not going to let user decide on the Id of the resource, I put files in system as GUID and keep whatever user feels as metadata.

Exposing average people to the filesystem is wrong level of abstraction. That is why iOS and Android apps are going that way - but as I myself am used to dealing with files it annoys me that I cannot have that level of control, but I accept that I am quite technical.

Dealing with files used to be something everyone interacting with computers had to do. It is something average people can do.

I think too much abstraction is a mistake and adds a lot of unneeded complexity.

People should learn something about technology they use. If you want to drive, you need understand how steering wheels work, if you want to drive a manual car (usual where I live and have lived) then you need to know how to work a gear stick and the effect of changing gear.

> used to be something everyone interacting with computers had to do

There were far fewer people 'interacting with computers' at that level years ago.

Everyone with an office job was still a lot of people though.

I'm not even sure 'everyone with an office job' had a computer. It certainly wasn't true 35 years ago. An office might have a computer or two, but not everyone had one, nor was everyone expected to use it.

And so should we be able to have “é.txt” and “é.txt” in the same directory (with a different UTF-8 normalization?) What encoding should we use BTW?

I’m not advocating for case-insensitive fs (literally the first thing I do when I get a Mac is reformat it to be on a case-sensitive fs), but things are not that simple either.

> And so should we be able to have “é.txt” and “é.txt” in the same directory

That's what Linux does.

It does create some problems that seem to never happen on practice, while it avoids some problems that seem to happen once in a while. So yeah, I'd say it's a good idea.