I think /mnt is where you manually mount a hard drive or other device if you’re just doing it temporarily, and /media has sub folders for stuff like cdrom drives or thumb drives?
Yeah, but why?
You can mount a hard drive anywhere, and why not put all the cdrom and thumbdrive folders in /mnt, too?
/media is for removable drives. If you mount something there, file managers like Gnome will show you the “eject” or “disconnect” button.
/mnt drives show up as regular network drives without that “eject” functionality.
I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but I have a secondary SSD in my laptop that I mount on /mnt/elyssa and in every DE and distro I tried it appeared as a removable drive with the “eject” button. Right now I use Fedora with Gnome and if I install this extension or enable the removable drives option in Dash to Dock, it shows me that drive. Maybe some mount option in Gnome Disks, but since it’s not that big of a problem, I haven’t looked too much into it.
/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.
/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.
And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.
