How to STOP automounting of USB drives in KDE version of CachyOS?

Issues & Assistance
1

I don’t want inserted USB drives to be mounted automatically. Standard KDE behavior on other systems is not to automount. It causes all kinds of problems (for example KDE Partition Manager can’t

I checked System Settings → Device Auto-Mount and it is all disabled there

I tried changing kde5rc to false in autoload, and it is being ignored.

[Module-device_automounter]
autoload=false

I’m running Desktop version of CachyOS but the installer decided that I need Steam so Steam is installed as well. Could it be related?

2

At least on my system, it prompts for mounting (y/n) on USB devices when plugged in. Upon reboot, there is no automatic mount.

3

under system settings there is a category called Device auto-mount, maby you are looking for that?

4

as i mentioned in my original post everything is turned off in the Device Auto-Mount

5

It doesn’t work that way on my system either.

  1. Where did you get the idea for kde5rc? I may be wrong but that sounds like a config file for the previous version (Plasma5/KDE5)
  2. I also have steam installed so I don’t think it’s related to your issue.
6

Are you sure they are mounted? The default is not to mount, yes it will discover it but will not mount until you mount it.

7
  1. kded5rc and kded6rc both are present in the fresh install of KDE Plasma 6.6.4 in both latest CachyOS and Kubuntu 26.04. Only kded5rc has “automounter” setting. On Kubuntu it is set to “false”. Changing the setting on CachyOS made no difference
  2. yes all partitions of any usb drive inserted into the computer get mounted automatically, and in addition to that, if the filesystem is btrfs (possibly others too, I haven’t tested all of them but not ext4 or fat32), “steamapps” folder gets created on that partition
  3. “default” is what your system is configured to. apparently the “default” on my system is to mount and write to it. like I mentioned before it appears to have something to do with steam being installed “automagically” even though I was installing Desktop version. it seems that cachyos developers “know better” and shove the Handheld on to my computer just because it happens to have a built-in thumb controller…
8

btw, uninstalling cachyos-handheld, gamescope-session-cachyos and steam, “fixes” the problem, but I would still like to know how to stop automount without uninstalling steam…

9

The difference your system from mine, is you had cachyos-handheld and gamescope-session-cachyos so it would seem to be one of those packages that is the issue. Regular desktop cachyos with plasma & steam is not.

10

This problem seems to be caused by jupiter-hw-support package, which specifically designed for Steam Deck hardware support. If you don’t use a Steam Deck and don’t use Steam Gaming Mode either, you can safely uninstall this package, which in turn completely fixes the automount problem.