Mostly, because as of 2020, most things don't use UUIDs. See e.g. 1) https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/linux.md https://

Mostly, because as of 2020, most things don't use UUIDs. See e.g. 1) https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/linux.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/insta... 2) man fdisk 3) man mkfs And so on. The /dev/sd_ is primary, with UUIDs as kind of an afterthought It ought to be the other way around, with UUIDs as the primary, proper, canonical name and interface, and a legacy backwards-compatibility layer for /dev/sd_ devices. It's even reflected in the directory structure. Yes, I CAN list disk "by-uuid," label, id, partuuid, or path, but those are special cases with sd_ as canonical. It's kinda retrokludged in there. I never said USB/etc. didn't work. Just that it wasn't architected for it.