Hello Everyone,
I was testing things out with GIMP and Krita as photoshop alternatives for Linux and while they are great for having very little latency with tablet inputs unlike photoshop these days, the apps on Linux won’t let me save files that are on external drives.
I am currently resorting to saving the files on the desktop and then replacing the same files on the external drives but I don’t think this practice would last very long since I am essentially deleting a file each time. Is there a reason why apps like GIMP or Krita don’t allow for saving files on an external drive?
The first reason could be that you installed those applications as Snaps or FlatPaks. Those are containerized applications and they do not have full access to the underlying filesystems.
The second reason could be one of permissions, depending on what filesystem is on the stick. If it is a Microsoft filesystem — i.e. vfat, exfat or ntfs — then those are filesystems that do not recognize POSIX-style permissions and file ownership, which means that the kernel must emulate those at mount time — see the two tutorials below.
So, if you want help with this — which I reckon you do, since you’re posting about it — then you’re going to have to give us more information.
Also, if you are dual-booting with Microsoft Windows, then you need to make sure that Windows Fast Startup is disabled, and then fully shut down Windows, because by default, it uses a kind of hybrid sleep which does not fully shut down its filesystems, with as a result that the Linux kernel regards them as damaged and will not write to them.
Right on, GIMP is most likely a Snap since I installed it from Manjaro’s software manager. Krita is from Steam so not sure what that constitutes at the moment.
Two of my externals are NTFS3 and another one is exfat.
Luckily I have windows and Manjaro on separate drives but I have Fast Startup disabled anyways because of other reasons I have been told. I am going through those articles now, looks like emulation will be the solution.
How are you mounting it, and with what options? And what filesystem exactly?
This is kind of covered in Aragon’s links. But more concisely…
A common issue is people can’t write to vfat/exfat drives is just because they don’t have write permission by default. It should work with sudo or as root, but not as a standard user.
You can set all permissions, at least to test, by mounting with option: umask 000. Comma delimited in fstab, or mount -o umask 000 ...
(It’s like having chmod 777 or .. a+rwx on everything.)
But it’s almost as easy to make it read/writable for only your user, or a group.
technically - if you want to save on external media - you need to mount it.
You cannot browse to an external media in the save as dialog - it must be mounted previously.
If you need the device to be mounted on a specific path for you to save onto - you need to create a mount unit - which then is activated by an automount unit when you access the defined storage path.
As @Molski said, gimp is an official Manjaro package, but if you used pamac (“Add/Remove Software”) then you have access to Snaps and FlatPaks, and then you may have inadvertently installed one of those formats instead of the actual repository package.
Likewise, krita is also in the official Manjaro repositories. steam and its applications on the other hand also run containerized.
Remove those two packages and install them from the repository. Then, report back on any progress.
With “mount” or “mount and open” no sudo should be needed, with the default mount point /run/media/youruser/ — so you mean the file pickers for these programs can’t access that path? Certainly explained by using containerized versions.
If you create a mounpoint in your /home/youruser, you should already own the mountpoint. If you create it anywhere else, you’ll need to take ownership of the mountpoint the first time, then mount your device to it, which will require sudo.
well I don’t know if this counts as fixing it, but I went to “configure removable devices” settings on the devices tab and manually set my externals to automatically mount on both attachment and login. Now all apps work the way I want now, I can only assume it did all the things mentioned above just from that.
well here is where things get strange, running pamac from the start menu does nothing but clicking on Manjaro’s software manager is able to bring it up. However, it isn’t listing apps I installed from flatpak via sudo nor apps from a tar.gz file.
At least I can confirm that GIMP and Krita are now technically working the way I wanted with the whole being able to save files to an external drive thing, but I tried the sudo command you listed on another app I installed through sudo and it listed that the target app is not found. This is however a completely different topic so I’ll share that somewhere else.
— then you’re going to have to give us more information.