What’s the easiest way to make external USB drives automount, without adding them to fstab? It should just work even if someone else hands me their flash drive.
I’m running sway on Arch if that matters.

  • @[email protected]
    9•1 month ago

    DEs dont use mount and fstab, they use udisks2 which works with polkit, GUI prompts or rootless.

    Using udisksctl prevents a ton of breakages.

    I dont know about how autostart files work anymore, I always thought just place stuff in ~/.config/autostart but now those dont work anymore on KDE, sometimes.

    I think you use your init system for that. If you go fully rootless, you can create a user systemd service that mounts the drive.

    mkdir -p ~/flashdrive

cat <<EOF > ~/.config/systemd/user/flashdrive-mount.service
[Unit]
Description=Mount flash drive on /dev/sda
#After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/udisksctl mount --block-device /dev/sda --mount-point /home/$USER/flashdrive
RemainAfterExit=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

systemctl --user enable --now flashdrive-mount.service

    Not sure if After=multi-user.target and WantedBy=multi-user.target twists the space time continuum or something.

    I am always kinda confused by those targets, as you must state one.