user filesystems

Dear linux experts: I am again surveying file systems, and from the perspective of an enduser, it looks pretty dismal. yes, speed, size, and journaling are much nicer now than they were in the past. but we seem to have lost out on features why not gain an end-user advantage on the desktop over windows? at some point in computer history, we had

a optional file compression built into the fs on win95. This was more than 10 years ago. (compFUSEd is a great start, but there is something to be said for universal availability.) this can be very useful, e.g., to sync one's filesystem as a backup to a compressed file system, or in crammed situations.

b versioning, more than 20 years ago on DEC and VMS systems. I know about CVS, but filesystem-based versioning was such a nice feature to have from an end user perspective. It had no learning curve. (the emacs ~ is a poor subsbreastute.)

c undelete, for about 20 years now on FAT. I know the unix kludges to create similar functionality. they are not the same. the file system itself should try to keep information on how to reconstruct deleted files, but still make their space available to the free pool upon demand. preferentially keeping the most recently deleted files away from new files would be a big plus.

I guess b and c are really not that dissimilar. all three could-should be optional. newer features such as a data base as file system for fast search would also be nice. so would be an optional "write checksum upon close" to detect what files are what they are supposed to be and uncorrupted.

its remarkable that so little has improved in the end user filesystem area over the last 20 years. I guess all effort is going into large distributed networked filesystems instead. my point is that from a naive end user perspective, someone who is first starting to learn linux and wonder what its advantages over the windows are that came with the purchased computer, these could be real selling points.

or am I mistaken? is there a common user-centric filesystem instead of a performance-centric filesystem?

regards,

iaw