When is an ad an advertisement and not a recommendation? Microsoft clearly likes to use the term recommendation for what others may see as an advertisement.
There are recommendations in the Start menu, Settings app, Lock screen, File Explorer, Get Help app, and other areas of the operating system already. These are often not that useful. App recommendations in the Start menu are limited to Microsoft Store apps.
Now, Microsoft is testing recommendations in the Microsoft Store app. If you never use the app, you won’t be exposed to these. If you do, you may notice recommendations popping up when you try to use the built-in search.
First spotted by phantomofearth on X, two or three recommendations are shown whenever search is activated in the official Microsoft Store app.
While it might be suitable for server environments with 400+drives, all home setups will have fewer volumes than there are alphabet letters, so it’s a suitable setup there.
Someone else identified how you can run an extra command to identify actual location of a file, and while that’s useful, it’s an extra step that’s unnecessary when the design of the location string itself also identifies that. Unless you can tell me which drive /home/supra-app/preconfiguration/media is on - without running something different. (Vs windows: C:/Users/Someone/AppData/supra-app/preconfiguration/media) That’s what the design of WWW URLs was for - you never have to ask which domain a website is on, and it can even inform you about whether a site is trustworthy.
I don’t think you’re helping your case by showing there’s no drive location convention at all. A friend plugs a USB device in your computer while you’re busy in the kitchen. He’s fine if he just uses a UI autopopup, but if he needs the full path, he has to ask you where you’ve set up auto-mounting, if you have at all.
The thing is, you are absolutely free to use a
/c
,/d
,/e
mounting scheme, but you are not shackled to it like you are in Windows. Personally I like to organize my data in one big root (/
) file system on my NVME drive and then/data
for my bulk storage on HDD and/nas
for my NAS shares. I never have any problems knowing where my data is.BTW, I notice all your complaints revolve around “OMG it’s different” and “OMG the user can choose to do things differently… so complicated”. That is kind of the point of Linux you know?
At some point you just have to accept that it’s different and move on, or decide that it’s too complicated for you and use something else.
BTW, I wonder why people never make this complaint about Apple devices? It also has a hierarchical file structure without drive letters, after all it is also a Unix variant.
The dog whistle of “maybe it’s not for you” is pointless, since all we’re doing here is talking about preferences and opinions of design. Whether something is “complicated” or “poor design” is very subjective across many fields. It’s easy to laugh at someone pushing at a “Pull” door, but less so if there’s a pushbar there and they don’t speak English.
I could easily be facetious and suggest “Maybe Windows is just too complicated for you” but that’s similarly needlessly talking down to people’s intelligence. The topic only came up because it’s frustrating there’s no operating system out there that:
For now, issues like the last one are what keep me on Windows, and I’m not even claiming they’re easy to solve.
Well keep dreaming then. If that is what keeping you on Windows, you will never leave Windows. Nobody in their right mind is ever going to create a new OS with drive letters.
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