Yes. Another user could have restricted access rights on purpose, maybe? But I can still apparently seize them for myself by typing an arcane command into the terminal. Why shouldn't the UI give me a way to do this more easily?

If it requires typing in an admin password to solve, so be it, but at least the UI could lead me to the answer while offering a password prompt.

And yes, I wasn't telling you that Windows has no problems. In fact, Windows probably caused this problem -- this drive worked just fine with Linux the night before; then I transferred some files into it from Windows and plugged it back into my Linux computer and suddenly this happened. I have no doubt that Windows was responsible for messing up the drive state and causing the problem. But to a non-technical user, it's not a question of who is to blame; Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.

Hm, I'm a KDE user. I just tested what happens when I try to open a folder I don't have access rights for. The standard file browser Dolphin says authentication is required. "Act as administrator." If clicked there comes a warning and I can enter my password. Than it shows the content.

https://i.postimg.cc/VLgkWpy7/image.png

This feature exists since 2022.

https://kde.haraldsitter.eu/posts/kio-admin/