Drive letters. How quaint.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Windows. How quaint.
The Linux approach did take some getting used to, of course, but mounting drives to folders just makes too much sense. The only qualm I've had with it is if the drive doesn't get mounted and stuff gets written to that folder, which, AFAIK, isn't possible in windows.
Also, tbf (and balanced), windows also supports mounting drives to folders iirc, it's just a weird way to do it.
I have to admit that growing up on windows made it really confusing this past week when I installed a new hard drive and had to add it to my steam library. I have to create a partition? And "mount" it? Using the terminal and commands??? Then after following tutorials for that I discovered Bazzite comes with a disk manager which makes it much easier.
Interesting read but I can’t think of much of a reason to ever use nonstandard drive letters except to maybe hide malware or something.
Maybe you have more than 26 storage devices, but don't know how to use folder mounts on windows, or are weirdly attached to bad design decisions from the 1980s.
Yeah but as file explorer and even powershell can’t use the mount that 27th drive mounted to +:/ isn’t going to be very usable
One (contrived) example would be to have a drive that doesn’t have any installed file system filters on it. Filters being the hooks that windows, antivirus, etc have that intercept file writes and such. Could make it much faster on windows for that use-case. I can see custom software using that drive.
Contrived? Definitely. But potentially useful. I can see it working similarly to something MS has in testing which is the file system thing that is super fast but is limited in features—can’t seem to find it atm…
Edit: Found it. Dev drive via ReFS.
you can also mount it to a directory just like in POSIX systems
And is the default behavior once it runs out of "normal" drive letters I think.
Now I’m imagining someone making 💩: their default boot drive.
So? Who cares? Drive letters were always a dumb idea.
Also, obligatory "get your butt off of windows, switch to Linux."
Thanks for the share (pun intended)
That's a nerdy-ass pun.
Drive letters <<< whatever Linux is doing << the Amiga approach to drives
I haven't used an Amiga in several decades and memory is kind of murky. So how does the Amiga approaches drives?
Similar to Windows, but it's not just a single letter. E.g. df0:.
Its interesting to see how Linux-like NT paths are.
This behavior is actually in line with what I'd expect, as Unicode support in Windows predates UTF-16, so Windows generally does not handle surrogate pairs and instead operates almost exclusively on WTF-16 code units directly.
So it's just straight UCS-2, and the software does enforce that, pretty much the opposite of "WTF-16".
Edit: Pretty sure "modern" (XP+ I think) Windows actually does enforce UTF-16 validity in the system, but there's always legacy stuff from the NT4/2K era that might turn up.
What's drive letters?
In inferior operating systems they refer to mountpoints as "drive letters". "C" is like "root"
Hard drive, e.g. C:, D:, etc. From what I gather from the headline
Drive Letters are also for removable media (floppy disks, CD/DVD drives, others [magneto-optical drives, etc), not to mention network drives. Not just Fixed Disks (hard drives).
It's just an easy way to specify one disk from another.