Yes, to a certain extent we can compare HDFS and Local File System.
A filesystem is the methods and data structures that an operating system uses to keep track of files on a disk or partition; that is, the way the files are organized on the disk. The word is also used to refer to a partition or disk that is used to store the files or the type of the filesystem
where as
HDFS is a distributed filesystem which stores data in a distributed manner across various slave machines.
HDFS creates an abstraction of resources, let me simplify it for you. Similar as virtualization, you can see HDFS logically as a single unit for storing Big Data, but actually you are storing your data across multiple nodes in a distributed fashion.
Hope this will answer to your question to some extent.