[Software] behavior is not working with usb drives - writing to usb is not accurate, and "early" eject produce hard locked system

[suplero]

i'm on a test install in 26.04, just upgraded to 26.04.1 and writing a file to a usb drive.

the file is the 4.8gb 26.04.1 iso image.

coming from 24.04, the behavior seemed to be the same broken behavior in 26.04 that 24.04 had - all files sent to the usb "buffer" count as moved files, whether the file write operation on the usb drive is actually finished or not. 26.04 said the 4.8gb iso file "moved" to the usb drive in 20 seconds - which is total lie, but that is the same lie that 24.04 told.

the difference is that in 24.04, when the usb drive is "safely removed", the remove icon spins and spins until the entire file write is complete on the usb drive.

i don't know what happened in 26.04, but after waiting a couple minutes after the pop said "moving finished" (or copy finished, same principle), i clicked to "safely remove" the usb drive.



the entire system locked up. hard lock. almost immediately after clicking safely remove. could this be a hardware issue? maybe, but earlier today in 24.04 the exact same sequence when writing 26.10 to the usb drive worked perfectly.


i didn't think i would ever say this, but i am going to have to start looking for alternate distros now. i've been on kde for over 20 years, and on kubuntu almost since the beginning, with kde 3.
i love the look and feel of kde and have installed on so many machines over the years, work, friends, family, but now the issues are just becoming more than i want to work on.

tips: fix the usb write file bug - in windows the file transfer actually shows write speed and when the write popup disappears, the usb drive can be ejected immediately. this is the expected behavior. why the copy/write popup goes away after mere seconds for huge files is a lie.

no idea why the computer hard locked. i waited 10 minutes to see if the write finished internally on the usb, which might allow 26.04 to unfreeze, but even after 10 minutes it was no go. why should the simple action of clicking to remove the external usb cause a hard lock? definitely not a behavior that i have ever seen in 24.04, and i've done a lot of ejecting after the popup said "finished", but the usb was nowhere near finished writing. same machine. so many files over the last month even.

is there something in 26.04 that would demand more of the hardware?

Operating System: Kubuntu 26.04 LTS
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.6
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.24.0
Qt Version: 6.10.2
Kernel Version: 7.0.0-38-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-12400F
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.2 GiB usable)

[Snowhog]

AI Overview

When you click Safely Remove (or Eject) on a mounted USB drive in Ubuntu Linux while a write operation is still underway, several distinct actions and consequences occur:

What Ubuntu Tries to Do

• Waits for Pending Cache Flush: Clicking eject/safely remove instructs the operating system to finish and flush all pending write operations from RAM (the kernel write cache) to the physical flash memory of the USB drive. [1, 2, 3]

• Blocks or Queues: Depending on the file manager or desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, etc.), the system will often block the removal and wait until the cache is completely written before unmounting and powering down the port. If you physically pull the drive out while it is still trying to flush or finish, bad things happen.

What Happens if You Physically Pull It Too Early (Interrupted Write)

• Incomplete File Transfers: The file or data currently being written will be truncated, missing, or filled with zeros/garbage data.

• File System Corruption: If the operating system was in the middle of updating file allocation tables, directory structures, or journaling data, the entire file system (e.g., FAT32, NTFS, ext4) can become corrupted, making the drive unreadable or throwing "Access Denied" / "RAW format" errors. [1, 2, 3]

• Data Loss on Related Files: Caching groups multiple write operations together. Interrupting it can damage more than just the file you actively dragged over.