989
Ancient traditions
(sh.itjust.works)
I still have my tape drive.
drive letters are cursed
Drive letters are one of the few things I miss about windows now that I'm on linux.
Drives letters are a pain in the ass. Especially when working with network drives.
Windows, like DOS and CP/M before it, was designed for a standalone microcomputer that the user had physical access to, so they lettered the drives A, B, and C, That would allow mounting 26 drives which should be enough for everybody forever.
Linux, like UNIX before it, was designed to run on a minicomputer in a university basement accessed through a dumb terminal where the end user has no physical access to the hardware, so the file system presents as completely abstract.
In the modern paradigm of local PCs attached to network storage, both approaches have their disadvantages.
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Drive letters feel obvious from a user perspective, and I presume that's part of the reason for their invention - each physical disk (or partition) gets a letter, and we're done! Problem solved.
The Linux paradigm is pretty different in that every device is a file, and files can mount anywhere. (And that really does mean every device, not just disks. Even your mouse is a file and you can read mouse events via the filesystem)
The approach has a huge amount of flexibility. Most obviously, file systems can logically mount anywhere in the directory tree, so you can organise disks and network mounts anywhere you want them and never run out of letters.
It's a perfectly reasonable pattern for example to want your OS files to be on one partition, and your user home folder where you store your files on another. On Windows that would mean ignoring all the default Documents, Pictures etc folders, trying not to use them (and making sure other apps and programs which like to don't) and using D:/ for files. On Linux you can mount your storage right in your home folder, and everything still works just as it would if it were a single disk.
I can see why you miss Windows, but the unix-like approach is a powerful abstraction when you're used to it - just quite different.
To be fair to Windows, it's just a right click on the special folder (documents, pictures etc) - properties - location. You can place them wherever you like.
Yeah, but /mnt/ has its upsides!
I'm never really sure if I should be using /mnt, or /media, or neither, or both.
That's just one of many things that I find a bit confusing about the main linux directories. Windows has many directory oddities too though. I guess that tends to happen when an old OS walks the fine line of maintaining backwards compatibility and conventions while expectations, needs, and best-practices gradually change over time.
General convention is that /media is for removable media that is automounted and that /mnt is for permanent devices. Some distros automount to /run/media instead of /media though.
Convention aside, you can mount to anywhere you like.
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Literally does not matter. You can mount them right on your desktop if you want.
I’ve been a Mac user since 1989 and what is A:?
ETA: Never change Lemmy
Floppy disk drive.
A and B were reserved and your first hard disk drive was C.
The two disk drives had fixed memory addresses because they were often specific ports on the motherboard, and loaded the OS, etc. Things after that were more dynamic.
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/dev/fd0
Who here remembers turning part of the ide cable round to add a second floppy drive?
Probably noone because floppys dont use ide.
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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