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Comment by avidphantasm | Hacker News Reader

No, they need to ditch drive letters first. The NT kernel and NTFS don't even require them (I used to mount disks without drive letters back in the NT 4 era). They just don't care enough to get rid of this annoyance.

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Nobody wants to use \??\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolume3\ in their paths.

Nonsense. You can mount filesystems to mount points in much the same way as is done in Unix. No one would ever need to do that.

You can indeed use mount points like C:\mountdir, but that's still on the C drive, which is a drive letter. It's not "no drive letters".

And if \ was an alias for C:\ this would just be \mountdir.

users , especially non-technical, find it highly useful in my experience. Is it a net positive to get rid of them, or will it largely only make developers happier ?

It’s arcane and technical for no reason. /Users/ME/Documents, /Media/MyThumbDrive/…, etc. are much clearer and less confusing than C:\…

At the very least, drive letters do make SMB shares a bit simpler for the non technical folks. T:\MyData is easier for them than \\0010-somehost-win.site1.mycorp.loca\Share01\MyData\

I used to support a group of completely tech illiterate users in construction & manufacturing. Them figuring out T:\ was hard enough, ask them to type in a UNC path into the address bar in explorer and you get "Wtf is file explorer? Wtf is an address bar? Where is the backslash key??"

Then in this hypothetical world you could mount \\0010-somehost.win.site1.mycorp.local\Share01 to /Share01 rather than T:

Or just use sane names like \\MyDivision\Share01\MyData and mount that to \Network\Share01 or some such.

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