Mounted drives in fstab have directories as /run/user/

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I have an fstab where I mount my drives to /mnt/nameofdrive. When I use my mark down app, office apps, or qbittorrent I configure them to use drives that are mounted in /mnt/. When I go back into settings the configurations are pointing to /run/user/ as if the drives weren’t mounted in /mnt/. Everytime I restart an app I have to redirect it back to /mnt/. This is causing apps to crash and is just overall annoying.

here is my fstab

/etc/fstab

Created by anaconda on Mon Mar 16 16:08:26 2026

Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under ‘/dev/disk/’.

See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info.

After editing this file, run ‘systemctl daemon-reload’ to update systemd

units generated from this file.

UUID=3f292b13-b6c1-42a7-bc52-2328ffee704f / btrfs subvol=root,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=70a20edb-c7f2-4740-b361-2ae9af748c1e /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=A5DB-D84C /boot/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2
UUID=3f292b13-b6c1-42a7-bc52-2328ffee704f /home btrfs subvol=home,compress=zstd:1 0 0

UUID=34f34a9e-196c-4e92-bb98-4b81014259eb /mnt/fire xfs defaults 0 0
UUID=3550e043-cde0-4167-b31b-37ca39d47784 /mnt/BFD ext4 defaults 0 0
UUID=a778c43e-e0e5-47fd-b20a-0e9f7cc32b35 /mnt/backup ext4 defaults 0 0

Gnome disks confirms that the drives are mounted at the /mnt points. mount -a has no errors. blkid confirms that the uuids are correct. I am new to the redhat based distro, I am wondering if theres something new that I haven’t done before.

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Are those flatpaks app? The may not have access to /mnt/xyz but the system uses a helper called xdg-desktop-portal. This helper maps your /mnt folder to a temporary, virtual location, usually something like /run/user/1000/
You can use flatseal and give those apps direct access to /mnt

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3

Are these Flatpak apps or RPM packaged apps?

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4

Are these external usb devices ?

If they are, udev automatically attempts to mount them under /run/media/USER when they are seen. I think udev first checks for an entry in fstab, then if not found there will be mounted under /run.

The UUID from blkid may not be correct. What does lsblk -f show for the device?
There are usually (at least) 2 different UUIDs for each device. One is the device UUID and the second is the partition/filesystem UUID. What is used in fstab should be the partition UUID.

$ sudo blkid /dev/sdf
/dev/sdf: PTUUID="1106b7ba-e782-4b69-ab63-0af18e3c1be1" PTTYPE="gpt"


$ lsblk -f /dev/sdf
NAME   FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sdf                                                                           
├─sdf1 vfat   FAT32       6216-DA93                                           
├─sdf2 ext4   1.0         9304de31-ac52-4621-b011-a1f4ba1083e9                
└─sdf3 ext4   1.0         5b8ac51b-0bd9-4a62-be34-3e6aabd05cc1

Notice the difference in the UUID shown – lsblk -f shows the partition UUID by default while blkid shows the device (partition table) UUID. File systems must be mounted by partition UUID.

5

I think that this is the solution. Using flatseal I gave the apps permissions to specific directories. Thank you!

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6

Off-topic, but blkid at the partition level shows you two different IDs per partition (on a GPT disk, anyway). For example:

$ sudo blkid
...
/dev/nvme0n1p5: LABEL="fedora-boot" UUID="4fcd507f-af2b-4574-a8d4-4ade52070c32" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="d29b14b2-5e6c-44b8-8c70-0d041fef1c90"
...

UUID is the filesystem UUID as mentioned above. PARTUUID is the per-partition UUID stored in the GPT partition table.

You can use either of those in /etc/fstab - the line starts with either UUID= or PARTUUID= according to which you’re using.