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I've run out of drive letters a few times. I've got what, 26 mount points less system reserved mount point letters less reserved mount point letters for each slot in the fancy multi-reader. It sounds like a lot but you can use them up pretty quickly these days. Without network mount points, I'm looking at AB,C,D,EFGHI,J,K and half of those letters point at empty slots in the multi-reader.

- Contrast; Never had an issue with running out of mount points with my same hardware under Debian. I either mount attached storage where it makes most sense (my HDD for VMs is mounted a directory .../virtualization not V:\virtualization) or mount removable storage by name (my flashdrive mounted .../media/flashdrive).


I've seen drive letters change. I have a flashdrive that mounts on F and shortcuts to kick off a portableapps menu along with various files and folders but I have to direct them at a drive letter. So when a different flashdrives gets plugged in first, Windows mounts it on F while my regular flashdrive mounts on G; all my desktop shortcuts break. Now, I'm admin so I Su to Administrator and fix the drive letter mapping in the storage manager but any of my users would be stuck fixing there desktop shortcuts. More likely, they'd be loosing work time while filling a helpdesk ticket.

- my flashdrive always mounts to .../media/flashdrive and any sync software, shortcuts, links or scripts that interact with it just work.

In general, a regular user probably doesn't need to ever leave /home/USERNAME (aka. ~/ ) either since within that is all the directories they actually interact with are Documents, Music, Video and Downloads which are pretty standard among major desktop environments.

On the Windows side you have similar folders all contained within My Documents; the user doesn't really care about the other folders within there home directory let along throughout the rest of the system. In a business environment they will also have network shares mounted to drive letters by why shouldn't these simply be displayed as additional folders within the user's own workspace?

Windows has actually supported a rooted file system (for lack of knowing the correct label) since around WinXP if not Win2k. This is yet again an issue of third party software holding everything else back as the letter mounted file system remains only because there are programs still in use which only support the letter\directory type paths.

In your case specifically, as a sys-admin or learned geek, get comfortable diging around in /etc, /home/* and /var/logs/* with maybe a few other places under /var/. Much of the rest is managed by the system and package installer. I can't remember the last time I had reason to dig into /bin let along /usr/bin for something. Primarily though, you'll remain within your home directory.

In the case of a system builder or admin, I can't overstate how nice it is to have rational partitioning presented as a unified directory tree. My system files, user files, VMs and archives all on seporate hard drives yet they all mount under directory names resulting in a single directory structure. I'd love to seporate my Windows OS files, installs programs, user directory, user data tree and VMs between without each becoming a new drive letter. Imagine c:/users/USERNAME still apearing at that letter/path even though it's physically on a seporate disk or partition. Reinstalling Windows; no worries, format the OS partition and reinstall without killing any of the other partitions. Make sure they all mount back to the same directories and tadaa.. back in business.