I have a NTFS drive for Storage, which is shared between Win 11.

I want to change the location of (or replace) ~/Downloads, ~/Music, etc…,.

Note that the link to made is between NTFS and EXT4.

I found two ways while searching.

   1.Creating **Symlinks** in `~` with target pointed to folders in NTFS drive.

   2. **Mounting** the NTFS folders **directly** to`~/Downloads`, `~/Music`, etc..,.

Which one should I do? Which one is more beneficial?

Also how to mount folders to other folders (option 2) ? (I would really appreciate a GUI way)

I know this is not that important of a thing to post on Main Linux Community, but I already asked 2 linux4noobs community, and they are empty.

This is a continuation to my previous discussion, where most of the people said,

  1. It doesn’t matter where I mount.

  2. Mount certain folders directly into home other. (like mounting /mnt/data/music to ~/music)

  • ferretEnglish
    4•1 month ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 month ago

      bind mounts don’t usually have the problems that symlinks do. The only time I’ve had issues involve container systems like docker or flatpak.

      • @[email protected]OP
        1•1 month ago

        Lots of internet people says that one can’t create mount points across different filesystems.

        problems that symlinks do

        Can you explain more please?

        • @[email protected]
          2•1 month ago

          Lots of internet people says that one can’t create mount points across different filesystems.

          Citation needed. Bind mounts work just fine wherever you put them, again: you need to mount your source filesystem somewhere then you can bind mount paths from that mounted filesystem anywhere in the running VFS tree. You should Google linux bind mounts, they’re quite simple.

          problems that symlinks do

          Can you explain more please?

          Some software has problems following symlinks properly and fails to work unless given the symlink source path instead

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•1 month ago

      Thanks man.

      It’s easier to automate

      I’m failing to see how and why one would do this? ( just curious )

      I personally like symlink syntax more than mount syntax :P

      same man. It’s just more simple.