Option to use /dev values instead of UUID values

[Rashkae]

Liam Proven wrote:

> You are, as ever, being an idiot, Karl.
> 
> For starters, I, like many power users, professionals and so on, add
> and remove partitions on machines all the time.
> 
> But using partition IDs, be they UUIDs or GUIDs or whatever, is a
> majorly beneficial move. It enables the OS to correctly find its
> volumes and boot even when:
> - the motherboard died and the disks were moved onto a new one;
> - the system drive is moved into an external case;
> - the partitions are copied onto new physical media if the old media
> was failing;
> - the partitions were moved onto a new larger drive as part of an upgrade.
> 
> It is harder work for those who manually edit fstab, yes, but the
> payback is immense. As someone who fixes computers for a living, I
> would be very unhappy if someone who was too lazy to copy & paste
> UUIDs chose not to use them and as a result I was unable to rely on
> Ubuntu still working if its partitions were rearranged.
> 


And still there's the big elephant in the room that gets overlooked by 
many Linux users who lovingly cherish and maintain old computers.  Back 
in the day, over 90% (number pulled from arse) computers had exactly 1 
hard drive controller, which could hand a maximum of 4 hard drives, and 
the method to reference those hard drives was fixed (primary and 
secondary master/slave).  Pretty simple to keep /dev notation in line. 
But now that's completely different. Most Mobos have at least 2 hard 
drive IO controllers, 3 or 4 buses, and the bios reference to each drive 
is completely fluid, and can often get changed with no notice.  Going 
back to /dev is just not an option, and making it one on install is just 
inviting a regression in terms of support and ease of use.