I thought you were talking about just opening the drive to use it from the file browser.

I do actually have a drive I use for automated backups, but I just used the GUI to change the automount setting:

I guess that's a little bit inconvenient, but its like 3 clicks, adding a step to something I had to do to set up some other software. Its not any more complicated than disabling sticky keys in Windows.

Except we're not comparing it to disabling sticky keys, we're comparing it to needing needing to follow an entire page's worth of instructions, pressing secret key combinations and entering commands into the terminal, just so you can use your computer without it phoning home to the mothership. And that's on top of the fact that the instructions are probably going to be different in a year since microsoft is deliberately fucking with you.

So on windows a drive will not automount the first time, you have to assign a drive letter, which it then remembers. If you skip this its just a drive in the device manager with no mount.

You can accomplish the same in Linux so the drive automounts on boot with a nofail option so that if it is disconnected from the PC the boot moves on rather than waiting on the drive to become available. But otherwise thr DE will let you mount it instantly.

This is a non problem. Linux has issues but drive mounting is not one of them.

Same with windows, first time you plug in it asks for drive letter, (which is mounting) if you hit ignore, that disk won't be mounted at reboot, but if you choose a letter it will

GNOME has user session defaults that can automount, but also YAST partitioner can play with fstab if you want.

Where do you get once every 2 years? Do you never reboot your machine?

I'm hearing you like to reboot your machine unusually often.

The reason I can think of where clicking would be a huge pain in the ass is an automatic task. I have some of those, but I put them on machines that I treat as servers, and the time between reboots is genuinely counted in years, for those machines.

At this point you must be missing the point on purpose.

I wasn't before, but now I am.

I find your argument distasteful. If you want a server, use a server. But there's no need to shout to the world that servers require command line use. That's normal in 2025.

If you treat your laptop like a server, that's okay. No one is judging. But my grandma isn't doing that, and it rings hollow to complain so loudly about it in a thread about average users enjoying Linux Mint.

An average user will never even notice the issue you have been complaining about, while enjoying the product for free.

I don't normally tell people to go open a pull request, but you should do so, if only to get a better understanding of what the community has already given you for free.