Prompt to mount a storage device when accessing a path that can deterministically be ascertained to exist on that storage device

Brainstorm
1

Current Situation

With the premise that I possess an unmounted filesystem labelled as “filesystem_label”, I do one of the undermentioned, expectable user actions:

  1. Restore a tab and/or window, or:
  2. Attempt to access a “Places” entry.

If the path involved in those actions resides at “/run/media/filesystem_label/”, [1] Dolphin shall report that the path doesn’t exist, even though it knows that the label for the filesystem is “filesystem_label”:

The file or folder /run/media/$USER/filesystem_label does not exist.

Proposal

Considering that, at least on cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:42, filesystems’ mount points are named using their labels, I believe that Dolphin should:

  1. Prompt the user to mount the filesystem:

    Screenshot_20250417_121804
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  2. …and explain to the user that the filesystem is merely inaccessible, until mounted.

Rationale

I suggest this because the current necessity to mount the filesystem is significantly more complex for a novice user than explorer.exe on Windows’ (and, presumably, Finder on macOS)’ behaviour, and this cannot be easily improved because auto-mounting external storage devices isn’t secure.

Additionally, for me, the auto-mounter isn’t fool-proof:

Screenshot_20250417_121336
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  1. \/run\/media\/storage_device_label\/.* ↩︎

2

It would indeed be neat if it would just automagically mount the storage device instead of “wrongly” reporting that the path does not exist. Between the various mount options I am not sure how this would be implemented though.

1 Like
3

@felixernst, perhaps, in the meantime, if the user is attempting to access a non-existent path inside the distribution’s default storage mounture directory, [1] [2] Dolphin could at least mention in the error message that the path may exist on an unmounted storage device.

  1. unix.stackexchange.com/revisions/338316/6 ↩︎

  2. unix.stackexchange.com/revisions/177132/3 ↩︎

4

That would make sense to me.

1 Like
5

This works as described on macOS, FWIW. So in principle it is possible somehow.

1 Like