[Feature Request] Streamline mounting drives/shares using Dolphin

Brainstorm
1

Mounting drives on Linux is still a mess. You can usually get things working, but it’s far from a painless experience. It’s a problem that virtually every new user runs into at some point.

Why is it so difficult to reliably auto-mount a secondary internal drive? Why is it so easy to mount a drive in a way that prevents executing programs from it? And why can simply removing a secondary drive suddenly make the entire system unbootable?

Let’s fix this.

When a user mounts a drive, the system should prompt them: “Would you like this drive to auto-mount on boot?” Additionally, there should be a clean, user-friendly section in System Settings for managing all mount behavior. We already have decent handling for external media like flash drives, but there’s a clear gap when it comes to additional internal drives.

Common issues users encounter include:

  • Drives constantly requiring the root password to mount

  • Programs such as Steam being unable to execute code from the drive

  • The drive being automatically mounted as root, so the user can’t write any data to it

  • The drive having been set up on one Linux system and then moved to another, resulting in the user suddenly being unable to write to or modify files

  • The system becoming unbootable after removing the secondary drive because the nofail option was not included

How users end up in these situations isn’t the main focus. The real problem is that when people try to “fix” mounting issues, they often stumble through a series of steps that lead to these exact problems (and many others).

Right now, users are commonly told to use GNOME Disks (gnome-disk-utility) to manage auto-mounts, which feels clunky and insufficient.

The important takeaway is this: How can we better detect these common mounting issues and proactively resolve them for the user?

2 Likes
2

one of the better features of the plasma desktop is the automount feature under the Disks & Devices in the system tray.

it has a simple GUI to handle the automount of any drives attached to the machine without ever having to deal with fstab at all.

i use it exclusively.

that said, unless you accept the default of automount everything… and instead try to only check certain items, then reliability of the automount suffers greatly and often fails upon reboot.

you can simply click on the failed mount in dolphin and it will reattach, but it’s an extra step.

at least that’s my experience on plasma 5… hopefully it’s at least no worse on plasma 6.

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The issues you described above are directly related to how users are mounting those drives.

1 Like
4

I saw this video where a new Bazzite KDE user had this issue, it happens at 3:23