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> Windows is still stuck in a weird directory naming structure inherited from the 80's that no longer make sense when nobody has floppy drives. I think you cou

> Windows is still stuck in a weird directory naming structure inherited from the 80's that no longer make sense when nobody has floppy drives. I think you could make this same statement about *nix, except it's 10 years _worse_ (1970s). I strongly prefer the fhs over whatever MS thinks it's doing, but let's not pretend that the fhs isn't a pile of cruft (/usr/bin vs /bin, /etc for config, /media vs /mnt, etc)

gerdesj 11mo ago
Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want. Why get upset over /media vs /mnt? You do you, I know I do. For example The Step CA docs encourage using /etc/step-ca/ (https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-server-production/#running-step-ca-as-a-daemon https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-ser...) for configuration for their product. Normally I would agree but as I am manually installing this thing myself and not following any of the usual docs, I've gone for /srv/step-ca. I think we get enough direction from the ... "standards" ... for Unix file system layouts that any reasonably incompetent admin can find out which one is being mildly abused today and get a job done. On Windows ... good luck. I've been a sysadmin for both platforms for roughly 30 years and Windows is even odder than Unix.
- Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
  > Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want. Why is the root of one of my drives `/` while the roots of my other drives are subdirectories of that first drive?
  - TimeBearingDown 11mo ago
    Only the root of the root filesystem is / The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root. The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path. * clarity
  - eichin 11mo ago
    Thinking of it in terms of namespaces might help; it's not that the drive is special, it's that there's a view that starts from / and one disk filesystem happens to be dropped there and others are dropped elsewhere; with something like initramfs there aren't any drives on /, just a chunk of ram, though you usually pivot to a physical one later (many linux-based embedded systems don't because your one "drive" is an SD card that can't handle real use, so you just keep the "skeleton" in memory and drop various bits of eMMC or SD or whatever into the tree as-convenient.)
    - Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
      I do get it, I just don't think that the UNIX way is necessarily more natural than the Windows way.
  - Dylan16807 11mo ago
    In multiple ways, / doesn't have to be one of your drives.
  - Hendrikto 11mo ago
    Because you (or your distro) configured it like that. You don’t have to do it that way.
  - 1718627440 10mo ago
    It's not, it's a shared namespace. It just happens that one of your drives is mounted at / and the others are not.
  - yencabulator 10mo ago
    You can make / be none of your drives, if that's what you wish. Just have a tmpfs and mount things into it. The mechanism is generic and pretty. The specifics of how it's often used are legacy-driven. Nothing in unix really depends on the specifics.
kazinator 11mo ago
There is more pliability in the Linux ecosystem to change some of these things. And anyway, there has to be a naming scheme; the naming scheme is abstracted from the storage scheme. It's not the case that your /var and /usr are different drives; though it can be in a given installation.
akdev1l 11mo ago
/usr/bin vs /bin distinction is not relevant as all major distros have gone usrmerge for years now so /bin == /usr/bin (usually /bin is a symlink)
sli 11mo ago
All of those are optional restrictions, not mandatory. On Windows, it's (practically) mandatory. Maybe some Windows wizards could get around the mandatory restrictions, but an average Linux user can get around the optional ones.
- rusk 11mo ago
  Streaming as defacto metaphor for file access goes back to tape drives. Random Access patterns make more sense with today’s media yet we’re all still fscanf-ing Of course there are alternatives but the resource-as-stream metaphor is so ubiquitous in Unix, it’s hard to avoid.
- GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
  Drive letters are just /mnt, you can get around that, even with GUI.
  - darkwater 11mo ago
    So why a default Windows install still uses and shows C:?
    - GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
      Because A is reserved for floppy drive, and B - for zip drive.
      - otterley 11mo ago
        Drive B was always a floppy disk drive. Zip disks presented themselves with drive letters higher than B (usually D: assuming you had a single hard disk). However, some (all?) Zip drives could also accept legacy 3.5" floppies, and those would show up as B.
        DiabloD3 10mo ago
        You're confused and you're thinking of the LS-120 SuperDisk. On some machines, it could be setup to appear as A: or B: when a 3.5" floppy was inserted. Zip drives were never compatible with 3.5" floppies, and always were enumerated using the first available external storage letter (ie, D: in typical machines).

gerdesj 11mo ago

Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want. Why get upset over /media vs /mnt? You do you, I know I do. For example The Step CA docs encourage using /etc/step-ca/ (https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-server-production/#running-step-ca-as-a-daemon https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-ser...) for configuration for their product. Normally I would agree but as I am manually installing this thing myself and not following any of the usual docs, I've gone for /srv/step-ca. I think we get enough direction from the ... "standards" ... for Unix file system layouts that any reasonably incompetent admin can find out which one is being mildly abused today and get a job done. On Windows ... good luck. I've been a sysadmin for both platforms for roughly 30 years and Windows is even odder than Unix.

Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
> Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want. Why is the root of one of my drives `/` while the roots of my other drives are subdirectories of that first drive?
- TimeBearingDown 11mo ago
  Only the root of the root filesystem is / The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root. The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path. * clarity
- eichin 11mo ago
  Thinking of it in terms of namespaces might help; it's not that the drive is special, it's that there's a view that starts from / and one disk filesystem happens to be dropped there and others are dropped elsewhere; with something like initramfs there aren't any drives on /, just a chunk of ram, though you usually pivot to a physical one later (many linux-based embedded systems don't because your one "drive" is an SD card that can't handle real use, so you just keep the "skeleton" in memory and drop various bits of eMMC or SD or whatever into the tree as-convenient.)
  - Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
    I do get it, I just don't think that the UNIX way is necessarily more natural than the Windows way.
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  In multiple ways, / doesn't have to be one of your drives.
- Hendrikto 11mo ago
  Because you (or your distro) configured it like that. You don’t have to do it that way.
- 1718627440 10mo ago
  It's not, it's a shared namespace. It just happens that one of your drives is mounted at / and the others are not.
- yencabulator 10mo ago
  You can make / be none of your drives, if that's what you wish. Just have a tmpfs and mount things into it. The mechanism is generic and pretty. The specifics of how it's often used are legacy-driven. Nothing in unix really depends on the specifics.

kazinator 11mo ago

There is more pliability in the Linux ecosystem to change some of these things. And anyway, there has to be a naming scheme; the naming scheme is abstracted from the storage scheme. It's not the case that your /var and /usr are different drives; though it can be in a given installation.

akdev1l 11mo ago

/usr/bin vs /bin distinction is not relevant as all major distros have gone usrmerge for years now so /bin == /usr/bin (usually /bin is a symlink)

sli 11mo ago

All of those are optional restrictions, not mandatory. On Windows, it's (practically) mandatory. Maybe some Windows wizards could get around the mandatory restrictions, but an average Linux user can get around the optional ones.

rusk 11mo ago
Streaming as defacto metaphor for file access goes back to tape drives. Random Access patterns make more sense with today’s media yet we’re all still fscanf-ing Of course there are alternatives but the resource-as-stream metaphor is so ubiquitous in Unix, it’s hard to avoid.
GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
Drive letters are just /mnt, you can get around that, even with GUI.
- darkwater 11mo ago
  So why a default Windows install still uses and shows C:?
  - GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
    Because A is reserved for floppy drive, and B - for zip drive.
    - otterley 11mo ago
      Drive B was always a floppy disk drive. Zip disks presented themselves with drive letters higher than B (usually D: assuming you had a single hard disk). However, some (all?) Zip drives could also accept legacy 3.5" floppies, and those would show up as B.
      - DiabloD3 10mo ago
        You're confused and you're thinking of the LS-120 SuperDisk. On some machines, it could be setup to appear as A: or B: when a 3.5" floppy was inserted. Zip drives were never compatible with 3.5" floppies, and always were enumerated using the first available external storage letter (ie, D: in typical machines).