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Comment by _chu1 | Hacker News Reader

Why does every distro mount USB mass storage devices differently? "/run/media" vs "/media/" vs "/mnt/"

evolution.

/mnt came first. and distros started mounting stuff into it. but actually it was never meant to be used for that. it was supposed to be an always empty directory where a sysadmin could mount something temporarily if they needed it.

so distros moved away from /mnt and started using /media

then /run was invented as a place for all that semi-automatic temporary stuff that needs a place while the system is running.

by looking at where a distro mounts stuff, you can see how long they have not bothered to follow changing standards.

/mnt historically was used as a single mount point. This became problematic when it became common to have multiple temporary mounts, for example a CD-ROM and a USB stick. /media solved that by stating mountpoints are folders inside it, eg /media/cdrom.

right. what early distributions were doing was creating subdirectories within /mnt, but that got in the way when users wanted to mount something manually. at least it did bother me.

personally i wish /media would have stuck. i find the current paths /run/media/username/device rather unpractical. whenever i connect a data device i have to go searching for the mountpoint.

Things lile this are why I use Windows daily. I can assign a specific USB mass storage device a letter it will always use and I memorize it.

you can assign a mountpoint to specific devices on linux too. that's not a new feature.

giving sensible defaults to automatic mounts is the issue here.

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