I hope this article gets archived in a computer history, so people in the future can read how today's default operating system persisted in requiring its vict..., umm, users, to honor an archaic practice long past any imaginable justification, while free alternative operating systems don't have this handicap.

I regularly have this conversation with my end-user neighbor -- I explain that he has once again written his backup archive onto his original because he plugged in his Windows USB drives in the wrong sequence. His reply is, more or less, "Are computers still that backward?" "No," I reply, "Windows is still that backward."

The good news is that Linux is more sophisticated. The bad news is that Linux users must be more sophisticated as well. But this won't always be true.

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rwmj 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are Linux /dev device paths (originating from Unix) really much better? They're a pretty odd feature if you think about it. "Everything is a file", except only certain things can be files and at least by convention they only appear under /dev. Plan 9 takes the everything is a file concept to its logical conclusion and is much better designed.

Edit: Also /dev/sdX paths in Linux are not stable. They can and do vary across boot, since Linux 5.6.

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lutusp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Are Linux /dev device paths (originating from Unix) really much better?

Not better at all, which is why Linux uses partition UUIDs to identify specific storage partitions, regardless of hardware identifiers. This isn't automatic, the user must make it happen, which explains why Linux users need to know more than Windows users (and why Linux adoption is stalled).

> Edit: Also /dev/sdX paths in Linux are not stable. They can and do vary across boot, since Linux 5.6.

Yes, true, another reason to use partition UUIDs.

> Plan 9 takes the everything is a file concept to its logical conclusion and is much better designed.

It's a shame that Plan 9 didn't get traction -- too far ahead of its time I guess.

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hakfoo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I always saw it as two different mindsets for data storage.

One vision is "medium-centric". You might want paths to always be consistently relative to a specific floppy disc regardless of what drive it's in, or a specific Seagate Barracuda no matter which SATA socket it was wired to.

Conversely it might make more sense to think about things in a "slot-centric" manner. The left hand floppy is drive A no matter what's in it. The third SATA socket is /dev/sdc regardless of how many drives you connected and in what order.

Either works as long as it's consistent. Every so often my secondary SSD swaps between /dev/nvme0 and /dev/nvme1 and it's annoying.

	▲	ElectricalUnion 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And the sad thing is that stuff directly in `/dev` isn't neither, it's just "first come first served" order, that is more or less guaranteed to be non-deterministic BS. One is supposed to use udev /dev/disk/by-path/ subtree if one really wants "slot-centric" connections.

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dist-epoch 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Windows drive letters are also linked to some partition UUIDs, which is why you can move a partition to a different drive, or move drive to a different address (change SATA/m.2 port)

You can use mountvol command to see the mount-letter/GUID mapping.

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stockresearcher 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This has (more or less) been covered before!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652502

VMS expects to be run as a cluster of machines with a single drive system. How that actually happens is “hidden” from user view, and what you see are “logicals”, which can be stacked on top of each other and otherwise manipulated by a user/process without affecting the underlying file system. The results can be insane in the hands of inexperienced folks. But that is where NT came from.

	▲	lutusp 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		All true, all good points. Some day partitions and their unique UUIDs will be the sole valid identifiers. Then end users will have to be warned not to copy entire partitions including their (no longer unique) UUID. Sounds bizarre but I've had that exact conversation.