"This could be either a no-true-Scotsman, or a tautology."
It's even worse!
I am saying that working in terminals, with strings of text and non-binary-format config files ... and all of the tools built around that ... is an end in itself.
Every single "broken" example in the OP is something that I find non-remarkable and, in fact, makes perfect sense to me.
To argue for the OP, consider the case of passwd being parsed on every system call. That is simply sub-optimal. (It also seems exaggerated to me, and feels like a prime candidate for caching).
Further, there is an immense value in GUI based systems: discoverability. On a GUI, you can learn how to use a program without ever consulting a manual just by inspecting your screen. This addition is what brought the computer to the masses.
Finally, the terminal model of UNIX is just horrible. The hacks-on-top-of-hacks that are needed to turn the equivalent of a line-printer into something like nCurses or tMux are horrible. The current terminal is like this purely because of legacy. If you'd design a system for
"working in terminals, with strings of text and non-binary-format config files" from the bottom up, it would look totally different. Sadly, getting it to work with existing software would be a total nightmare.
All that being said, UNIX still has the better terminal (though I hear good things about powershell). Certainly, it is the best system for "working in terminals, with strings of text and non-binary-format config files". Though competition is sparse (windows, and maybe mac, depending on whether you consider it to still be unix or not).
Discoverability is definitely a feature of any decent post-2000 *nix terminal environment.
Man and apropos get you a long way.
The near ubiquity of --help as a flag helps too.
Well managed program distributions will even tell your shell how to tab-complete what it wants.
MOST CRUCIALLY, though, the text of a command line or config snippet can be pasted, emailed, im'ed, blogged, and found with a search engine! Try describing how to navigate through a moderately complex gui in text or by phone... it's a disaster.
In any case I haven't heard of performance problems. I think these files are needed basically for logging in and when tools like "ls" convert UIDs to names.
If there were performance problems, something would be done. And you can easily switch to LDAP or your backend of preference.
Asking not to make a point but because I genuinely don't have any clue: what is the distinction in your mind between a "directory" and a "folder", other than that latter term is more widely used in the Windows community?
In my mind (in the context of local file systems) the terms are basically the same although folders are usually objects that end users interact with. If someone says the "c:\windows\system32" folder or "/etc" folder I know what they mean but it sounds odd.
Often though it just reflects how recently you started using computers (more than MS vs Unix). I predominantly work in Windows but I call them directories but then I started with MS-DOS (and you type "dir" for a listing, right?).
If you started using computers with a GUI (and that's where you're most comfortable) then you might think of them as folders because on most platforms that's what the icon looks like.
I think the "folder" metaphor starts to break down a bit as soon as you're dealing with remote systems. Navigating to a parent "folder" on a remote FTP sounds weird to me, and it's telling that when browsing a FTP in a web browser even Internet Explorer 11 refers to directories - e.g. "Up to higher level directory" not higher level folder.
> it just reflects how recently you started using computers
> sounds weird to me
Are those actual arguments? I am not sure the parent poster asked what you found "weird" or wanted you to imply you use computers for a long time.
For what is worth, I'd still prefer "mount point" or "access point" to both "directory" or "folder" when talking about remote systems. So I am not bashing you -- it's just that your comment is full of subjectivity.
Well I'm not attempting to convince anyone of anything so no, not really. Merely my observations on a topic I find interesting. There are many things where I think there is a correct answer worth campaigning for, but folders vs directories is not one of them. It's a bit like whether you say "soda", "pop" or "coke", this might reflect where you come from [1] but that isn't an argument that one of the terms is right or wrong.
My comment was indeed full of subjectivity which was intentional - apologies if I didn't make that clear up front.
All of UNIX makes perfect sense if you are using UNIX for UNIX.
If you're doing other things, like abstracting to "folders" and so on ... I am open minded and can see where it starts to fall apart a bit.
But I use UNIX for the sake of UNIX ... I am interested specifically in doing UNIX things. It works great for that.