Linux

Hey man, I think this is a perfectly valid question to ask here. Also I was one of the people who replied on the other thread as well.

So, let's start with the why. I imagine you want to have ~/Downloads be inside your large disk so files get automatically downloaded there, I imagine ~/Documents is to have access to the same documenta on both OSs. If that's not the why or there's something else let me know as I'll be basing my answer on this assumption.

Last time we told you about how you can mount things wherever you want to, I imagine by now you have an entry on your fstab that automatically mounts that NTFS drive somewhere. I'll call that somewhere /ntfs just to give it a name/path, but any other path should be the same.

If you wanted your ENTIRE NTFS partition to be on ~/Downloads it's as easy as changing that fstab entry from /ntfs to /home/gpstarman/Downloads (or whatever your username is). But I imagine you want something more complex, you want to have /ntfs/downloads and ~/Downloads to be the same directory.

Like you found out there are two ways to do this, the first and most easy one is to create a link. To do so graphically just open whatever file explorer you use right click and drag from one path to the other and you should have an option link here or something similar. Note that you might need to delete or rename your existing ~/Downloads folder to have the link be named that. If you wanted to do it by command line it's ln -s <target> <link name>, so in your hypothetical case ln -s /ntfs/downloads ~/Downloads

This should work for 99% of cases and honestly I don't think you should care too much about mounting. I'll reply to this comment with the steps for mounting and explaining why it's different just to be on the safe side.

Not related to your question exactly, but if you want certain "special" folders (Downloads, Music etc.) to be in specific places, it might be worth setting up xdg data dirs to the appropriate location.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories

Folders? you mean directories 👀

Mount the disk (if you ask me at /media/nameofdir) and configure ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs (99% of that time that would be the .config dir in your home lol) and define each XDG_***_DIR= to the respective directory in the path of the mounted disk, no need to make symlinks, though you might need to because there is likely many apps that don't follow xdg specs.

I would really appreciate a GUI way

I know gnome-disks has a GUI way to change the mount options, I don't know how good it is though.

I don’t think this is a bad question at all, personally I would prefer to mount the drive once and symlink folders for a couple reasons:

1. It’s easier to automate
2. it’s theoretically faster (to initialize) as symlinks are effectively free
3. I personally like symlink syntax more than mount syntax :P

One possible con to symlinks is that certain (linux native) software can misbehave when it has to interact with them, but this is a fairly uncommon issue. Stuff ran through wine or proton should support them just fine, as they are abstracted away.

For data like this from another filesystem I usually like to mount the entire volume somewhere private (like under /run) and then bind mount the parts I want to use into their desired locations (like /home/foo/Download, etc.)

I do this with a second ext4 drive that I use for performance sensitive storage with my primary btrfs system root. It works well, just be aware of edge cases involving containers (you may have to grant the container access to the original mount location under /run in addition to the bound path. This is definitely a gotcha when working with those paths with flatpak.)

Flatpak can sometimes complain when there's a symlink (Steam, in particular, does this) so you can use the symlink, but have to update XDG-USER-DIRS to point to the actual location. I wrote it up here: https://ideatrash.net/2024/07/howto-update-xdg-user-dirs-to-avoid-symlink-issues-with-flatpak.html

a lot of good answers here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/557733/what-is-the-difference-between-ln-s-and-mount-bind#557735

Seconding this. As it's a mount that is explicitly for your user, you might as well mount it where it's most convenient for you.

If, on the other hand, it was a mountpoint for the entire system, I'd keep it in /mnt and go the symlink route - I'm old fashioned, and I like to use /mnt for as much as possible. I find it more tidy that way. On that note, I'm not 100% sold on /media yet

afaik you can't mount folders, only drives. So what you're looking for are symlinks (symbolic links, as opposed to hard links; use e.g. ln -s <source> ~/Downloads). I have a few in my $HOME pointing to other drives as well.

if your NTFS drive is unmounted or unavailable, the link will be broken; but you won't have to recreate it in the future: so it's a "set and forget" operation for as long as the path the link points to remains the same.