this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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That's one of the things that semi-experienced Windows users need to wrap their head around, but I strongly disagree that drive letters are somehow inferior to a hierarchical file system structure. I mean, the A:, B:, C: ... convention was originally just intended for the first IBM PC with 1 or 2 floppy drives. It was never intended to support complex storage configurations, whereas the hierarchical file system was designed for Unix systems that had to handle multiple magnetic drives from the start. It is a much more flexible system to organize your file storage.
That's because there is a difference between a block device and a mounted file system. Windows just obscures that difference from you with its archaic drive mapping system.
All your block devices and partitions on your block devices will be in
/dev
with a meaningful name. You can list them with thelsblk
command. If a partition contains a file system that Linux knows how to use, you can mount it anywhere you like.No that's not "convention" at all. Some desktop environments may decide to mount undefined drives there, but there really is no convention, ultimately you mount it where you want it to be mounted.
If your unsure,
df /home/documents/notporn
should tell you exactly what drive it's on, but ultimately it's up to you to know how you've organized your storage.BTW I've said this before, but Linux is probably harder for users who know Windows just well enough to be dangerous than it is for relative beginners, because there are so many concepts and things they take for granted that they have to unlearn.
As an interesting fact, windows totally supports mounting positions to folders and as far as I recall it's been able to for a very long time, remember doing it as a teenager and thinking it was cool AF.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/assign-a-mount-point-folder-path-to-a-drive And https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/orphan-topics/ws.10/cc772671(v=ws.10)
Yeah, I believe that was introduced as far back as Windows 2000. It never really caught on though.
I think I did it back in xp, I was trying to figure out when support was added.
I don't think it's super advertised that it's a capability which definitely doesn't help its usage, heck I kinda forgot about it even though I used it until your comment triggered a memory.
I just booted up a Windows 2000 VM to check ... it's there in the disk management tool. It looks a bit weird with the drive icon in Explorer, but ok.