Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred for Case-Insensitive File-Systems

It's some kind of game theory game. If software and data is being transferred between Windows and Unix system it will be rare for Unix software to break on Windows, yet, Windows allow carelessness about capitalization which breaks when you round trip to Linux. Embrace, Extend, Exterminate, etc.

Case sensitive OSes like Linux don’t mix well with case insensitive file systems.<p>Take files under &#x2F;boot&#x2F;EFI (FAT). Packaging systems fall down on such — two RPMs can have different cases of the same filename and the package manager won’t know. They’ll just subtly overwrite each others file depending on installation&#x2F;upgrade order.<p>(And why should the package manager have to care about the case sensitivity of the underlying file system for each managed file?)

I grew to like case insensitive dbms like SQLServer as it makes me think less about casing when I write queries, but always wondered if that comes at cost of performance!