Flaky

Pretty much, yeah. I think Windows uses something like \\PhysicalDisk0 internally, then shows it to the user with lettering.

That’s for mounting, yeah, but when it comes to interacting with the hardware, Linux itself uses letters for some types of devices. For example, serial-connected ones (e.g. SATA internal drives, USB external drives) are /dev/sdx (x being a letter from A-Z). I don’t know what happens when all letters are used up though, maybe someone can chime in there? NVMe uses numbers it seems - my boot drive is /dev/nvme0n1

There are other ways to access devices and partitions besides that though. I just had to put EndeavourOS on a flash drive and the Arch Wiki recommended doing this by targeting the drive via /dev/disk/by-id/, which lists connected drives by name, connectivity and serial number.

What I think has happened is that Reddit performed a rollback after the crash happened during the blackout. I’ve had comments from 2021-22 being restored and which ones did get restored were pretty random. Twitter had a similar situation a while ago.