TL;DR - don't manually mount stuff to /media. It might end badly. Full version: A lot of people try to describe /mnt vs /media via use cases, e.g. do this with one, and that with the other.
The distinction is much more simple and has to do with how backwards compatibility is maintained while adding new infrastructure. /mnt was created a a place where you could put folders for various locations that would need to be manually mounted. This could include entries defined in /etc/fstab or for temporary mount commands. It is commonly used during filesystem recovery. /media is different. With the advent of device managers that automount disks there was a need for a location the device manager could use as the mount location. Before the modern implementation of /run that was /media. On most distros, /media is either a legacy folder that exists for backwards compatibility or a symlink to /run/media. You do not want to manually mount stuff to /media. This will generally conflict with whatever system service is handling automounting of USB sticks. Use /mnt for temporary mounts. A long long time ago, on a mailing list not so far away, someone was mounting disks to /media using fstab and it created pure chaos. He started getting duplicate folders since the automounter was unaware of his fstab setup and things got...weird. mydrive-1, mydrive-2, mydrive-3, and so on. Also note that this is not consistent across all distros. Back in 2005, /run did not exist, /media was managed by an autofs service, and all distros were pretty much the same here. Now, some have diverged. Technically, /media is deprecated and safe to remove since your automounter looks at /run/media. That might explain why Fedora doesn't have it, but Slackware still does. -Ben On Monday, August 18th, 2025 at 5:09 PM, Robert Detjens <rob...@detjens.dev> wrote: > That's also what I've heard; /mnt for internal, /media for external. Most > GUI apps now put removable mounts under the /run/media/$USER/ tmpfs where > udisks will mount stuff privately for each user. > > Strangely I don't have a /media anymore on Fedora, so maybe that convention > is less popular now or was mainly an Ubuntu thing (granted, this is an > Atomic spin). I definitely remember seeing it when I was running Ubuntu a > while ago. The AW has a snippet for having udisks put things in /media so > I'd guess this is probably a Fedora thing: < > https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Udisks#Mount_to_/media>. > > > - Robert
