I don’t see a way to discover it without clicking the Gnome UI, at which point it appears as /run/media/anatoli/786C-77CD.
I don’t get why it needs to be that complicated. Why it can not be just /mnt/ZOOM-H1? Could Fedora just abandon the convention that it doesn’t use (don’t keep those empty top level dirs) and provide useful top level dirs for terminal users to transfer files?
It is not a support question, that’s why I am placing it in Project engineering.
Red Hat Linux used to use the convention of mounting filesystems under subdirectories of /mnt, like /mnt/cdrom. However, many old-school sysadmins were in the habit of mounting temporary drives (or whole filesystems for some random purpose) at /mnt. This caused a conflict, so /media was proposed instead. This is in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard:
Historically there have been a number of other different places used to mount removable media such as /cdrom, /mnt or /mnt/cdrom. Placing the mount points for all removable media directly in the root directory would potentially result in a large number of extra directories in /. Although the use of subdirectories in /mnt as a mount point has recently been common, it conflicts with a much older tradition of using /mnt directly as a temporary mount point.
However, that standard only allows for certain fixed names (“floppy”, “cdrom”, “cdrecorder”, “zip”), and numbers to be appended to the end if there are multiple. That doesn’t meet the flexibility needed for modern systems.
Therefore, /run/media — it’s allowed, and out of the way of those older ways of doing things, so there is no conflict. (There was an attempt over a decade ago to make /media a symlink to /run/media, but that turned out to break things.)
We could drop them, but I notice that they do have specific SELinux labels:
I don’t mind against /mnt/usb and /mnt/usb2 when a second device is inserted. Then have some sane way to rename /mnt/usbto be accessible under human friendly name (like ZOOM-H1) from /media/ZOOM-H1.
If the kernel can also generate /media/README.md explaining what goes from where along with errors and possible actions, that would make it a perfect user experience from what is possible to achieve.
But /mnt/usbN for some unpredictable value of N is less predictable that the current name!
The current name is /run/media/USER/LABEL where USER is the your username and LABEL is the label on the filesystem you inserted, which you can change to whatever you want if the device is writable.
Specifically for a FAT filesystem like you seem to have I believe it uses the name/label (set with -n when using mkfs.fat) and falls back to the volume ID (set with -i and defaulting to a value derived from the time) if there is no label which appears to be what you are seeing. You can also use fatlabel to change the values.
In addition to what @mattdm said about the reasons for moving from /mnt the later move from /media to /run/media/USER was I believe motivated by security considerations so that user mounted filesystems would be in a directory owned by the user in question.
But /mnt/usbN for some unpredictable value of N is less predictable that the current name!
From the UX point, if I plug my phone, it will be /mnt/usb, because I plug it into USB. If I plug the second device, it will be /mnt/usb2 - that logic is fair and predictable for user.
The current name is /run/media/USER/LABEL where USER is the your username and LABEL is the label on the filesystem you inserted, which you can change to whatever you want if the device is writable.
I don’t want to type /run/media/anatoli (and if it is not my laptop then /run/media/$USER), each time when I could just type /media/ZOOM+<tab>. Whichever Linux gets this usability right, will get the entry in my bootloader.
Also, as I user, I don’t really want to care about FAT or whatever. I just want a fast way to locate files from plugged in device and move them in terminal. Then an ability to rename the device is needed if I want to automate things. I don’t want my workflow to break when I swap memory SD card on my external device, so renaming SD filesystem is not really a good solution. Also not a solution if the device is not writable.
Security might be a concern, right. I don’t see a problem if kernel could mount files in /media/DEVICENAME with ownership of the user who plugged in the device.
