General :: Make System Partition Letter / Number Designations Persistent?

Everyone who deals with Linux knows that partitions on hard drives are designated as "sdx#", i.e., sda1 sdb2, etc. I know through experimentation that the number portion of the designation is assigned not according to order on the disk, but chronologically in the order they are created.

Further, if you have several partitions on the disk-say, sda1 through sda3-and you delete sda2, the designation of sda1 will remain the same, but sda3 will become the new sda2. The creation of any further partitions on the drive will start with designation sda3 and increment from that point.

At times this creates a conundrum, especially concerning bootable partitions. Some time back I rendered a partition containing OpenSUSE unbootable because of this, even though Ubuntu owned the GRUB bootloader in the MBR. Ubuntu's GRUB could find and point to the partition using the command "sudo update-grub", but when OpenSUSE took over the boot-up process, its GRUB was pointed to the wrong partition and would freeze up.

My question is this:

Under Windows, one is able to make a Drive letter persistent. Windows will keep the drive letter for that partition and assign around it. Is there a way to change a drive designation number, or at least make it persistent, under Linux? It would be a handy method to forestall these types of booting problems, among other things.

Presently, when a person has installed Linux side-by-side with Windows and want to delete the Windows partition and expand the Linux partition into the free space, I will tell them to format the partition, then shrink it to next to nothing instead of deleting it. This preserves the partition ID scheme while giving them the space to expand their Linux partition into...especially helpful with a seasoned Linux installation that would be a PITA to reinstall and set back up.

Oh, and I already know about UUID. This article explains it, but if you look down through the comments, you will see reasons that it is problematic for desktop application and usage. I want to make it as simple as possible for new Linux users (and myself! ).