> 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

> 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.