Comment 7 for bug 390304

The changes that were made in karmic which make this bug possible:
-applications now use udev directly (using libudev)
-devicekit-disks replaces what used to be handled by the disk handling part of HAL

Spoke to Chris Coulson via IRC and he makes a strong point about persistence in mount point paths. With UUIDs as mount points, the mount points will be unique and will remain the same no matter what order the drives are loaded.

However the counterpoint is just as persuasive, it just depends which point of view you look at it from. New users to ubuntu, users typing in a path manually, users using application that do not utilize GIO and users that do not have auto-complete will find the change to UUID-based mount points to be extremely complicated as compared to the old mountpoints (/media/disk).

This behavior also changes what users have gotten used to. I fear this will alienate users, and show too much complication in a path when it is not necessary.

The argument on both sides sound very similar at this point:
New users say "If you want persistence in mount point names you can always label the disk."
Advanced users say "If you want simplicity in mount point names you can always label the disk."

That being said, the process to relabel a disk is not easy enough that we can do it in nautilus (like you could in mac's finder or windows' explorer). This would be much easier if we could graphically/easily re-label a disk without using command-line tools.

This is how it's done currently: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive

This is a brainstorm requesting simpler renaming by use of the desktop environment (no apps or command line)
See Brainstorm:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/20148/
And solution #3:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/20859/