I’m using Fedora 35 KDE that is fully up to date (also a beginner). I have two drives in my PC, Fedora is installed on the first one and the second was empty.
I found the KDE partition manager and formatted the second drive using the default btrfs and the second drive appears in the KDE file manager and asks for my password then it mounts.
Anyway my main issue is I’m unable to create any kind of file or folder on the second drive, the KDE file manager wont let me, what am I missing, is it some kind of permissions issue ?
You created the file system and it mounts, but by default the device and file system are owned by root.
You will need to make sure the mount point is owned by your user, then once the device is mounted also make sure the device is owned by your user, all before your user will be able to access the drive/file system. The command sudo chown USER:USER /path/to/mount/point will handle that for you once the device is mounted. (Put your user name in place of USER in the preceding command.)
You may want to consider placing an entry into /etc/fstab to automatically mount that device at your desired mount point when you boot. Using UUID instead of device name ensures the correct file system is mounted every time.
However I must say that this is quite disappointing and not at all user friendly for something as simple as having multiple internal drives in a PC, especially compared to windows.
if anyone from Fedora happens to read this and can prod KDE team in the right direction.
The KDE partition manager needs an apply selected user permissions to this drive.
The KDE settings menu while having an auto mount for USB drives does not support SATA/NVME drives which should be allowed, give the user the choice.
Having to enter in password every time to mount drive or risk the danger of editing fstab is just bad design.
It is expected that any user of linux will endeavor to learn the basics of linux file system permissions, file system hirarchy, and how to manipulate devices. The command line allows one to do much more than what is available within a gui.
If that is too complex for you then please go back to windows. If you want to stay with linux then learn a little bit about the basics of administration and embrace the power of doing things for yourself instead of being locked into a rigid mold of how things are done for you.
Henry Ford is often quoted as saying “they can have any color they want as long as it is black”. Windows provides the same choice. “You can do anything you want as long as you do it my way.”
The beauty of linux is that one can do (almost) anything they want and customize their system the way they want. A user is not locked into doing only what the software provider allows.
Just to add that when you install Fedora you can choose both drives and the installer will format them both to btrfs and you can use them as 1 single file system.