Hacker News Reader

> e.g. what mounting a filesystem means

Funny. I've been using Linux for 10 (?) years and I still don't know what mounting means. I just know it's something that needs to happen in order for me to access the contents of a disk. I don't really care about it either, I only care about accessing the data. Why isn't it automatic anyway? Windows does it automatically whenever possible, why can't Linux?

View on HN

> Windows does it automatically whenever possible, why can't Linux?

Linux can do that as well, every desktop environment worth their salt does it by default.

To expand on this a bit, desktop versions of Linux will happily mount filesystems when they're attached. Server versions tend not to because with a server you likely have a specific use case for the device you just attached, maybe you want to use it for database storage, or extra swap space, or any number of other things. There's no intelligent way to divine that just from the fact a new drive was plugged in, so it doesn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com