- the automatic mounting of USB devices with "sync" option -- welcome back to floppy-and-DOS-era (why not mount the hard disk that way, too?)
Hadn't noticed, what's the problem?
- I think it appears to be much slower since you have to wait (i. e. for the next prompt) until the data is written - in opposite to nosync whitch writes to the cache very fast and syncs to the disk in background.
- USB sticks, CF cards, ... can only be written a limited number of times. With sync option, the directory indexes get updated more often (every time you do something with one file - copying of 100 files may mean 100 writes) and the lifetime of your USB stick may be reduced. There was an interesting discussion about this in suse-linux some time ago. If you understand German, you can find details in the list archives.
The point is they expect you to pull out the drive without umounting it. Heck, even Windows have learned recently that mounting is useful, and MacOS had it always. SuSE is going in the opposite direction. So, what also counts for me is that when I'm e.g. compiling my music on my USB stick I would rather do several quick cp commands (possibly even from different xterms) and then wait for the umount to finish the job than - either wait after each cp, or - start many cp at once and forget about one when unplugging the stick Besides, it is often hard to tell whether there is somewhere some program still accessing the device, esp. if you work with it all the time. If you can umount, then it's fine, since umount will wait for the device to get free or issue a warning. But you cannot umount the devices mounted with subfs, you are just supposed to plug them out. That's why I say it's like in the good, ole DOS times: you need to wait for your program to finish writing the floppy, and then you take it out. No mounting or any other fancy stuff. The drawback is you can't hear the USB sticks to have finished writing -- some of them blink but hell, that's not the same. But one could try to implement a floppy-sound-emulator, possibly as kernel module. j., getting sarcastic after 15 hours of doing science