NT is a kernel, Windows is an Operating system.
Not quite right i.e. specifically "Windows NT Kernel".
It's all integrated, so who really knows what is what?
Ok, why Like the way MS DOS (and compatible really) assigns drive names:
Dumbest legacy problem ever. The real trouble is that drive letters are assigned by the BIOS in the order that drives are detected, so if you switch a few cables, the whole system gets screwed up. Even DOS should have been using remapped drive letters!
I have to fix an OS/2 system at work because the hard drive is dying. My solution is to copy one hard drive onto another. Unfortunately, plugging in a second hard drive messes up the drive letters, because the PC BIOS detects all primary partitions first, then logical partitions. So, before I had drives [C D E], and with two hard drives installed, I have [C F D][E G H]! All the user accounts are on the logical partition of the first drive, so when I boot the system with two hard drives, it won't log into the admin account! I'll have to fix the machine with a bootdisk, somehow, and, naturally, my boss can't find all the documentation for the machine. I guess I can just delete the primary partition on the second drive and use ONLY logical drives, but... oh, man. I just know fixing that machine is going to SUCK.
PC BIOS is crap! I'm surprised even OS/2 doesn't use remapped drive letters, though.
(Just for the record, I don't expect Linux to work like Windows. The easy installation, removal and upgrading of software is a feature I would expect from any OS.)
Linux was designed to be a little brother to UNIX, so naturally it lacks all the essentials we take for granted on Windows and Macintoshes. I like this quote I recently found from a GUI programmer:
Free Software developers have the ability to start from a relatively cruft-free base, but (as a gratuitously broad generalization) they have no imagination whatsoever. So rather than making their interfaces more usable, they concentrate on copying whatever Microsoft and Apple are doing, cruft and all.
-- Matthew Thomas, http://mpt.phrasewise.com/
Red Hat 7 comes to mind. It looks just like Win98 (down to the pixel, and a start menu that says "START"), but it's still Linux underneath.