>I have a really hard time explaining that hardlinks are not shortcuts even to programmers.
While the distinction is important to programmers and sysadmins, the average end-user treats shortcuts as if they were hard links, it would not make the UI more complicated to change the 'make link' behavior to hard-link instead of sym-link.
Yes it won't, but when you have to introduce the concept of multiple files could point to the exactly same data on the hard drive and no, it's not a "copy" of that file, it's rather mind-blowing.
While the distinction is important to programmers and sysadmins, the average end-user treats shortcuts as if they were hard links, it would not make the UI more complicated to change the 'make link' behavior to hard-link instead of sym-link.