Windows drive letters are ridiculous. Use an external drive for e.g. video editing, its letter can be stolen by another drive, you can’t work anymore.

▲ Arainach 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not while it's mounted. This is akin to complaining that on Linux if you unplug a flash drive and plug in a different one that second drive could "steal" /mnt/sdb1 or whatever.

▲ Filligree 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People did complain about that, which is why on Linux today that mount would use the disk UUID or label instead.

So it’s fixed. What’s windows’ excuse? :-)

▲ ChrisSD 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Windows also has uuids. E.g.:

    \\.\Volume{3558506b-6ae4-11eb-8698-806e6f6e6963}\

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Someone1234 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Which can be trivially mapped to directories for aliasing. Just like Linux.

Windows NT and UNIX are much more similar than many people realize; Windows NT just has a giant pile of Dos/Win9x compatibility baked on top hiding how great the core kernel design actually is.

I think this article demonstrates that very well.

	▲	jug 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, NTFS is quite capable. I mostly blame the Windows UI for being a bit too dumbed down and not advertising the capabilities well.

▲ hulitu 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Linux is broken from this point of view. Inserting an USB drive before boot breaks booting .

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Xiol 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Certainly doesn't for me. Skill issue.

	▲	dpark 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		“Works on my machine” is rarely a helpful response. Doubling down with the “skill issue” insult makes it rude in addition to being unhelpful. Two other people were able to concisely explain the problem instead of being rude and condescending.

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oasisaimlessly 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only if you have a broken kernel cmdline or fstab that references /dev/sd* instead of using the UUID=xyz or /dev/disk/by-id/xyz syntax.

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lutusp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> [ .. ] Inserting an USB drive before boot breaks booting.

Only if the machine's BIOS is configured to give bootable USB devices boot-order priority. So it's not about Linux -- in fact, the same thing would happen on a Windows machine.

Remember that in a properly configured Linux install, the boot partition is identified by UUID, not hardware identifier (in /etc/fstab). Consequently if you change a drive's hardware connection point, the system still boots.

▲ TazeTSchnitzel 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can fix the drive letter assignments at any time if they become a problem, or use a directory as a mount point if that's less troublesome. (Win-R, diskmgmt.msc)

▲ Kwpolska 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you go with the defaults, they might be. But if you manually define the letter for your external drive, it will keep it forever. (I have my external drive set to X. I’m not sure if Windows would respect that assignment if I had plugged in 19 other drives, but that is never going to happen.)

▲ avhception 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember vividly when a user couldn't access his smb drive from Windows because both his printer and also the computer's case came with one of these multi-cardreaders with n slots and the drive letters collided. That's when I learned that smb drive letters don't even come from the "global" pool of drive letters, because, and this is obvious in hindsight, they are a per-user affair (credentials and all that).

I think the concept of drive letters is flawed.

	▲	mrweasel 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Even Microsoft appears to agree with you, given that drive letters are symlinks. It's basically legacy, there's just no plan or reasonable path forward that will remove them.
	▲	p_ing 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I always tried to point people to DFS w/ the FQDN path. We added a shortcut to the user's desktop that pointed to their home folder on the DFS namespace.

▲ p_l 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only if the actual "drive letter" assigned to the drive is the special value for "auto".

Otherwise, the drive letter is allocated statically and won't be used by another volume.

▲ leptons 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can't work anymore only if you are incurious and unable to google a simple solution - assign a different drive letter with the disk management program.