I just installed xubuntu 21.10 on a new machine. I had been running plain Ubuntu with xfce4 installed (and using xfce4 as my display manager etc) previously, 21.04, though on a different (similar) machine. There, inserting an SD card or any other USB media would give me a corresponding icon on the desktop, from which I could mount/unmount/eject the media.
Now, I get nothing. I don't necessarily want to auto-mount inserted/connected USB media, but when I have the Thunar volume management option selected to do that, it works. I do not, however, see a desktop icon.
This seems to be a common problem, but in many years of running xfce4 I've never seen it. No discussions of the topic are sufficiently informative to suggest a course of action. A copy of Thunar --daemon is running, which is often suggested as a potential part of the problem. I don't recall in the past having to do anything to enable the desktop icons; they always just worked.
On a possibly related note, when I unmount a USB device I get a notification about data having to be written. I do not get a subsequent notification that the device can be safely removed, as I always did in the past (seven or eight years at least).
