Eh? I’ve never had a problem with reading NTFS drives in linux, including USB sticks and SATA/USB adapters. Are you just wanting to read them or use them as read/write? Write is a bit more tricky, requiring ntfs-3g, but most reasonable distros come with that nowadays.

Mint. It’s a great, simple, well supported first distro. And last distro, TBH. I know plenty of people like to distro hop as a hobby, but if you just want to use your machine pick a well supported basic distro and stick with it. Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora are all good options, but Mint is really aimed at newcomers.

The dev entry point changing like that means that it disconnected and then reconnected, which shouldn’t have anything to do with the specific file system on the drive. That really makes it sound like the drive isn’t getting quite enough power, which causes a brown out, which Linux detects as the drive getting unplugged and coming back, which is why it gets a new dev entry.

A look through the usb logs by using something like usbrip would confirm that.

Am I the only one annoyed the article is an article about a future article? Like I didn’t get anything out of their experience into linux because it’s just a pre-article and the user transition experience is what we’re interested in.

For real, it is 100% arch done “the right way” with sane defaults and thoughtful optimizations. Made the switch a few months back and hadn’t looked back. CachyOS is a wonderful project.

Interesting. When you say that they show up as a different drive completely, do you mean that their UUIDs change, or that they get mounted at a different point?

Anyway, random disconnection sounds like a hardware issue, maybe a USB brownout, as much as anything else. What’s your connection setup, distro and kernel version?

You’re the type that saw the iPhone’s first release and thought, “It’s stupid to use my finger to touch stuff on the screen. Just use the tactile direction buttons like an intelligent person would.”