Updates have rendered my optical drive unusable

Since Ubuntu Studio 22 I have had problems opening my optical drive. I know that the official forum for Ubuntu Studio help is AskUbuntu, but the only suggestion I got there was to reinstall the OS. Over the years I have found various workarounds, the most recent ones being modifications or additions to udev/rules.d, but all of these have sooner or later stopped working. The one thing that always worked until now was to use K3B. However, as of a week or two ago, even K3B cannot open the drive.

To forestall the obvious questions, my user belongs to the cdrom group and udisks2 2.10.1-6 is installed. Can someone please give me a hint as to how to get a handle on this, without having to revisit it every few months?

P.S. Even “sudo eject” doesn’t work.

Sorry, please excuse the unjustified blaming of KDE! ;-}

As it turns out, it was a HW problem: the rubber belt that drives the escapement no longer had enough traction to release the front panel latch. Replacing it with a similar sized o-ring fixed the problem.