> This approach is much more powerful than the Unix style of mounting. It occurred to me I should provide a qualifier here. Single-tree Unix pathnames have one

> This approach is much more powerful than the Unix style of mounting. It occurred to me I should provide a qualifier here. Single-tree Unix pathnames have one very powerful property that qualified schemes from the 1980s lack: self-similarity at every level of the directory hierarchy. This is why filesystem virtualization schemes like loop devices (CD and disk images, and things like EncFS), chroot, and overlays are possible and work so well. The 1980s schemes did not support these use cases and were more tedious to type out, and they rightly died out. But it is not either-or: TRAMP shows that you can have Unix pathnames for your local machine and qualified pathnames for when you need to specify where/how to access files.