[avidphantasm]

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.

[Dwedit]

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

[avidphantasm]

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.

[Dwedit]

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".

[avidphantasm]

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

[noselasd]

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 ?

[avidphantasm]

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

[thewebguyd]

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??"

[piperswe]

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

[avidphantasm]

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