4 ms·

I hoped for a future free of Microsoft software, and free of UIs designed by software developers. I hoped for a future with no drive letters. The first two ar

by 762236 5y ago

I hoped for a future free of Microsoft software, and free of UIs designed by software developers. I hoped for a future with no drive letters. The first two are successful: I use no Microsoft software in my life, and many user experiences are now designed by specialists. Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them.

derefr 5y ago
> Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them. They don't, really. The Windows NT kernel has a unified namespace — it's just not one with a filesystem at its root, but rather an object namespace, so users (and even developers) are almost never exposed to it. C:\ is just win32.dll-wrapper-ese for the NT object path \\?\Volume{some-guid}\, where \\? is the NT object (local) namespace root. You can find the GUID of your filesystem in diskmgmt.msc and navigate Explorer to \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ just fine. Look ma, no drive letters! Perhaps surprisingly, despite \\?\Volume{some-guid} being the name of a Volume object, what you find under \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ is a regular filesystem of Directory and File objects. It's as if Linux was set up such that / was a hybrid of procfs+sysfs+devfs, and all the filesystems were accessed by going to /dev/disk/by-uuid/... and navigating "into" one of the block-device nodes there.
- BatteryMountain 5y ago
  Awesome thank you for this, will dig some more on this, kinda interesting to me. Anything else you may want to share with us? I use storage spaces on Windows 10 on 1 machine with 2 drives to mirror them.. so basically a software raid. It's pretty interesting and it just works, I don't have to babysit it. Same with Zfs mirroring. Wonder by how much these two software mirroring techniques differ from each other.
michael-ax 5y ago
I was hoping for more even better UI's designed by programmers
- 762236 5y ago
  Yeah, that is another way to go: that developers become substantially better at UI design. I probably won't be one of those developers.
BatteryMountain 5y ago
Can you please expand on your dislike for drive letters? Why should we prefer to not have them? What will be in their place and how will it improve things? Genuine question, trying to imagine how/why I would not want drive letters. Maybe each device should just use the uuid set by the manufacturer? But then that's too ugly to display in a file explorer.. and often I don't just have 1 partition per physical device, so multiple mount points.. and other times I have 1 mount point with multiple backing devices (mirrors/raid).

by 762236 5y ago

derefr 5y ago

> Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them. They don't, really. The Windows NT kernel has a unified namespace — it's just not one with a filesystem at its root, but rather an object namespace, so users (and even developers) are almost never exposed to it. C:\ is just win32.dll-wrapper-ese for the NT object path \\?\Volume{some-guid}\, where \\? is the NT object (local) namespace root. You can find the GUID of your filesystem in diskmgmt.msc and navigate Explorer to \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ just fine. Look ma, no drive letters! Perhaps surprisingly, despite \\?\Volume{some-guid} being the name of a Volume object, what you find under \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ is a regular filesystem of Directory and File objects. It's as if Linux was set up such that / was a hybrid of procfs+sysfs+devfs, and all the filesystems were accessed by going to /dev/disk/by-uuid/... and navigating "into" one of the block-device nodes there.

BatteryMountain 5y ago
Awesome thank you for this, will dig some more on this, kinda interesting to me. Anything else you may want to share with us? I use storage spaces on Windows 10 on 1 machine with 2 drives to mirror them.. so basically a software raid. It's pretty interesting and it just works, I don't have to babysit it. Same with Zfs mirroring. Wonder by how much these two software mirroring techniques differ from each other.

michael-ax 5y ago

I was hoping for more even better UI's designed by programmers

762236 5y ago
Yeah, that is another way to go: that developers become substantially better at UI design. I probably won't be one of those developers.

BatteryMountain 5y ago

Can you please expand on your dislike for drive letters? Why should we prefer to not have them? What will be in their place and how will it improve things? Genuine question, trying to imagine how/why I would not want drive letters. Maybe each device should just use the uuid set by the manufacturer? But then that's too ugly to display in a file explorer.. and often I don't just have 1 partition per physical device, so multiple mount points.. and other times I have 1 mount point with multiple backing devices (mirrors/raid).