why don’t all apps allow access to all drives

[hag6]

A general question from relative noob. Some apps eg Celluloid, DeaDBeef, PIx provide access to files via File>Other Locations>On this Computer.

Other apps eg VLC, Audacious, EasyTag only allows access to files in the / directories. In the case of VLC and Audacious the Computer folder is grey and the Home directory is green.

Is there a way to allow all apps to access all drives/folders from within the app.

[Larry78723]

Other apps eg VLC, Audacious, EasyTag only allows access to files in the / directories. In the case of VLC and Audacious the Computer folder is grey and the Home directory is green.

Are you trying to access a data drive or what is your specific problem? There are no files outside of /home that you'd need to access unless they're on a data drive.

[spamegg]

Hello @hag6
The first group of apps you mentioned use the GTK user interface. Mint's desktop environments use GTK so they integrate well with Mint.
As a result, these ones have the neat "Other locations" on the left side bar.

The second group you mentioned use the Qt GUI. Mint's desktop environments are not based on Qt (other desktop environments like KDE Plasma are based on Qt). So it does not have the same level of integration with Mint or the same conveniences.

Mint devs try their best to integrate the interfaces of as many apps as they can but they can't cover all of them obviously.

When you are using a Qt app's file dialog, you need to navigate to "/" (you can do this by clicking the UP arrow symbol) and then navigate to "/media/yourusername/yourotherdrive" in order to access the other drives.

[AndyMH]

How many of those apps have you installed as flatpaks? Depending on what the developer baked into the flatpak when they built it they may not allow access outside of home.

[hag6]

Thank you all for taking time to respond with such insightful info. The question was posed mainly out of curiosity but also a concern that I have not set up my data drives correctly. I usually point a file eg a music file to open in a music player such as Audacious. I have tried to navigate inside the app to "/" /media/username/otherdrive but none of the installed data drives appear.

[spamegg]

What do you see when you run the Terminal command: lsblk? Mine looks something like this:

Code: Select all

 ➜ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 465,8G  0 disk 
└─sda1        8:1    0 465,8G  0 part /media/spamegg/Samsung850EVO
sdb           8:16   0 238,5G  0 disk 
└─sdb1        8:17   0 238,5G  0 part /
sdc           8:32   0   477G  0 disk 
└─sdc1        8:33   0   477G  0 part /media/spamegg/CrucialMX100
nvme0n1     259:0    0 465,8G  0 disk 
└─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0 465,8G  0 part /media/spamegg/Kingston

This way you can see where your drives are mounted.