The second lesson was mount points . In Windows, a USB drive was E: or F: . Simple. Here, it was /media/user/83C5-2D1F —a long, wandering path through a forest of directories. Rufus had to learn to find his drives not by letters, but by UUIDs and labels, using lsblk like a treasure map.

And Rufus would feel a pang of… something. Not jealousy, exactly. More like irrelevance. He was a tool, and tools want to be used. Every time a Linux user fumbled with command-line arguments or installed a Flatpak of some other writer, Rufus felt like a blacksmith watching someone hammer a nail with a rock.

“Why doesn’t Rufus work on Linux?” a user would ask in a forum.

“ $ Welcome back, Rufus. ”