I mean I feel stupid typing it now, but I’ve been using Windows since I was 5 years old, and Linux for about 30 days. It was not apparent to me that many of my folders were actually shortcuts to stuff in my user directory, and now that I know to look out for them the location of my applications make sooo much more sense.
Don’t feel dumb! This is just normal learning!
Symlinks are possible in Windows (at least in NTFS filesystems) but to my knowledge they aren’t used by anything official.
Windows’s weird “psuedo folders” thing it does with “Documents” etc is something else entirely.
I think ntfs does some weird shit with translating names of files in different languages too, and maybe they are simlinks
Say desktop is translated to ntesctop in some language, the real file is still desktop but there is a link as ntesctop --> desktop so without changing the system it flips from one language to another. I am not sure, I haven’t really spent much time on it, in recent years I did some installations at work but never got to play with it much.
I just assumed they were the same as “shortcuts” on Windows, coz to the end user they’re not all that different - File that points you to a different file or directory when you open it
Adding on to Windows: There’s no way (in the UI) to add symlinks. In Windows 10, symlinks must be created in an administrative command prompt. It is pretty damn clunky.