> Of course, the fact that you need a full DE to easily mount a usb stick as a non-privileged user means the whole thing is already failing hard. This is not ho

> Of course, the fact that you need a full DE to easily mount a usb stick as a non-privileged user means the whole thing is already failing hard. This is not how this should work. This is not true. I use udiskctl (and thus the udisks2-polkit-dbus based machinery) to mount pendrives in a vty on a regular basis. As a bonus, it asks for my password (the user one, not the root one) if i'm in an ssh terminal instead of a vty, and by configuring polkit i can have it allow me (only this particular user) to put a certain HDD to sleep (and no other actions like giving rights on the block device would do) without root password.