Just the simple fact that someone can’t plug in a hard drive and have it work every time, they have to go into a specific folder and write a specific arbitrary un-memorable UUID and tell it to always mount it on boot.

You can also mount partitions by label (LABEL=), but you have to name them yourself and make sure you don’t give two partitions the same name. The point of generating UUIDs is to have an extremely low risk of two partitions getting the same UUID generated.

But I think I get the issue, when I search for “linux automounting hard drive” I only see tutorials which explain how to use /etc/fstab.

It depends on what kind of automounting you are looking for, what they explain is the rare process of switching/adding internal drives that get mounted right after boot. First time that should be set up by the OS installer.

In case you were looking for automatically mounting USB drives/sticks, there are tools like udisks/udiskies who can do that and it’s possible they can handle internal drives too, but I never tried that since I want them to show up in specific places (~/Games, /var etc). Though I’d expect Gnome and KDE to have something like that included.

Steam Deck

That’s a machine that comes with a preinstalled and preconfigured distro with a very specific purpose. You can also buy preconfigured PCs/Laptops with support from System76, Tuxedo Computers etc.

people still had issues setting and forgetting their password For Windows, you are sacrificing security

If you encrypt your hard drives you are generally fucked if you completely lose your passwords, but that aside: On Linux you can basically just overwrite it withpasswd from grub shell or a live cd in combination with chroot and a physical intruder can do that as well. On windows you need to remember your security question or you need to have created a password reset disk to reset your local password. If you have/remember neither, sites recommend Reset this PC > Remove everything > Only the drive where Windows is installed > Just remove my files > Reset 🙃 I couldn’t find third party tools in reasonable time, but there might be some. You’d need a live cd as well, but secureboot can make that impossible.

I’d say for Linux you probably can reset your password in more situations than on Windows, but it’s less convenient and less secure (especially grub shell).

It’s a completely different story if you use a Microsoft account since Microsoft can basically change your password at will. If you don’t wanna get attacked from Microsoft it’s less secure, but since it allows two factor authentication and such it’s more secure in all other situations. You just can’t log in without internet.