this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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You can say goodbye to these legacy File Explorer options on Windows 11

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[–] Tinister@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Linux doesn't show drive letters either.

[–] falsem@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

There are no drive letters in Linux because that concept is specific to Windows.

[–] RoboRay@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Because that arbitrary concept doesn't exist in Linux.

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

I have like 4 drives at minimum and knowing where I am at a glance is nice, is there no hope

[–] Pseu@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Linux doesn't show drive letters because it doesn't use drive letters at all. Instead, everything is a file off of the root directory.

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe Linux has an alternative way to show drives. Idk I haven't tried Linux.

[–] Boabab@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Linux has a very different file-structure, which is the way your files are organized on a system. It's a bit weird at first, but once you get used to it makes a lot of sense. A second drive can often be found at /mnt/DRIVENAME or /media/DRIVENAME. But they show up in the file manager in a list anyhow.

[–] Flaky@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

That's for mounting, yeah, but when it comes to interacting with the hardware, Linux itself uses letters for some types of devices. For example, serial-connected ones (e.g. SATA internal drives, USB external drives) are /dev/sdx (x being a letter from A-Z). I don't know what happens when all letters are used up though, maybe someone can chime in there? NVMe uses numbers it seems - my boot drive is /dev/nvme0n1

There are other ways to access devices and partitions besides that though. I just had to put EndeavourOS on a flash drive and the Arch Wiki recommended doing this by targeting the drive via /dev/disk/by-id/, which lists connected drives by name, connectivity and serial number.

[–] eltimablo@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

When all the letters are used up, it goes into doubles, i.e. /dev/sdaa, /dev/sdab, and then triples, I believe.

[–] Boabab@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's totally true and somehow it didn't think of it. I think that is the closest equivalent of the Windows naming scheme on storage devices.
But on the contrary: I believe on Windows the drive letters ( C:, D;, etc) ARE used for recognition (by the user) while the drive is already mounted. But you can also mount them without assigning a drive letter, making it somewhat different than how it's handled in Linux. On Linux, the (average) user usually doesn't see stuff like "/dev/sda" unless they specifically look for it. At most, they will see the name that are assigned to the drive and it's mounting point.

[–] Flaky@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Pretty much, yeah. I think Windows uses something like \\PhysicalDisk0 internally, then shows it to the user with lettering.

[–] Pseu@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Linux doesn't have drive letters. They use an entirely different system, where everything is a file.

[–] DayDuJour@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In Linux there is one filesystem and you mount your drives in a folder of your choosing within that filesystem. By default external drives mount in /mnt or /run or wherever your distro sets a default mount point.