Stop and think for a moment - Where is your stuff? Your data, your photos, your games, your music? If you run Windows, I'll bet it's on the "C:" drive.
But what does "C:" really mean? Why does Windows put your important stuff on a drive named so cryptically, "C:"?
This is because of drive letter assignment. It's a process by which Windows picks letters to represent a drive (such as a CDROM or USB fob) or a partition on a drive. Drive letters date back to the days of MS-DOS and CP/M.
The first two drive letters ("A:" and "B:") are reserved for floppy disk drives. I'd be really surprised if your computer still has a floppy drive. Dell stopped selling systems with floppy drives in 2003, for example, and other vendors quickly followed. But Windows reserves letters for floppy drives anyway, for backwards compatibility.
So "C:" is the first hard drive that's on a Windows computer, which is why Windows always boots from "C:". If you have more than one hard drive on your system, and any CDROM or DVD drives, you'll see them show up as "D:", "E:" and so on.
Plug in a USB fob drive, and it will show up in the first available drive letter. Maybe that's "F:" or "G:".
If you are on a managed network (like, at the office) you likely connect to a shared network server, and Windows assigns drive letters to these spaces too. In our office, my network "Home" directory is the "H:" drive. We keep other things on the "O:" and "S:" drives.
One thing becomes clear - all these drive letters make it really hard to keep track of my documents. Where's my stuff?
But Linux makes it really easy to find your data. Drive letters simply don't exist under Linux. Instead, USB fob drives, DVD drives, and shared directories on the network are all referred to by a path in the filesystem. And the GUI makes it all easy to find.
Let's say I plug a USB fob drive into my Linux computer. Linux identifies the drive for me, makes it available to me, and creates a desktop icon so I can quickly access the files there:
These screenshots were taken using a "demo" user I set up on my laptop, hence the "demo's Home" folder.
Easy, isn't it? This USB fob drive happens to have a volume name of "My stuff", so that's the name Linux gives it.
If I'm in an application, this USB fob is always accessible as "My stuff". It's also conveniently located under the "Places" menu:
That screenshot shows the "My stuff" USB fob drive, but also a few other drives that are on my system because Windows is installed on the hard drive - my laptop actually boots Linux from a fob drive. On a system that just runs Linux, you wouldn't see the "Bitlocker" or "2.6 GB Filesystem".
Also in that list is something else that's cool with Linux - bookmarks to servers. You can easily create a connection to another server over a standard network protocol (Windows share, SSH, FTP, etc.) In my case, I've set up a bookmark ("Project web site") to access the web site for a project I run outside of Linux in Exile. If I click on that item, Linux opens a file manager window right to that location.
In a managed Linux desktop (say, an office that runs Linux) the administrator can set up access to network servers. I used to be a Unix/Linux systems administrator, long ago, and we set up file access to central servers in a very transparent way. For example, your home directory might look like it's on /home, but really it's on a central file server. And we had network shares available under /net.
You can do the same thing under Linux today, but a desktop administrator would also set up bookmarks for you automatically so you always have a quick way to access those resources. To me, a shared file area called "Software projects" (which points to /net/projects, on a network server) is more meaningful than calling it the "P:" drive. And my home directory in /home makes more sense than the "H:" drive.