So what is so "bloated" about gvfs? Its from Gnome, ok. But its not the desktop. I recently looked at Gnome again because some people were raving about the desktop, but its not my beer.

$ neofetch
   ..,,;;;::;,..                   alexk@ng3 
           `':ddd;:,.              --------- 
                 `'dPPd:,.         OS: Devuan GNU/Linux 6 (excalibur) x86_64 
                     `:b$$b`.      Model: 90BJ008CUK Lenovo H30-05 
                        'P$$$d`    Kernel: 6.12.90+deb13.1-amd64 
                         .$$$$$`   Uptime: 6 hours, 45 mins 
                         ;$$$$$P   Packages: 3248 (dpkg) 
                      .:P$$$$$$`   Shell: bash 5.2.37 
                  .,:b$$$$$$$;'    Resolution: 1920x1080 
             .,:dP$$$$$$$$b:'      DE: Xfce 4.20 
      .,:;db$$$$$$$$$$Pd'`         WM: Xfwm4 
 ,db$$$$$$$$$$$$$$b:'`             WM Theme: Default 
:$$$$$$$$$$$$b:'`                  Theme: Clearlooks-Phenix-Sapphire [GTK2/3] 
 `$$$$$bd:''`                      Icons: oxygen [GTK2/3] 
   `'''`                           Terminal: xfce4-terminal 
                                   Terminal Font: Monospace 12 
                                   CPU: AMD A8-7410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics (4) @ 2.200GHz 
                                   GPU: AMD ATI Radeon R4/R5 Graphics 
                                   Memory: 1556MiB / 7362MiB

Somewhere after a successful upgrade to Excalibur and (I think) a kernel update I discovered that, whilst my 2GB USB-Storage was automounted + auto-accessible via Thunar & could be unmounted via GUI, the same was NO LONGER true for CDROM / DVD / Blue-Ray external devices connected to the desktop via USB. iirc the same was true for a Seagate 2TB external FAT32 usb-connected HDD (I may not have checked that one before the fix).

I'm in the middle of preparing for imminent upgrade to kitchen + house & my time is limited, but I checked the Byte Computer that I've been upgrading since January — it needs Chromium + Thunderbird sync and we shall have lift-off — and sure enough that shows the identical problem as the 10-year old Lenovo that I'm working on right now.

After a couple of days of going down rabbit holes on the Byte I transferred back to the Lenovo and hey!, after yet another trip down a rabbit-hole I got a conclusive fix. So here it is:-

Login for me is SLIM, Desktop is xfce4 whilst the File Manager is Thunar. The important thing to realise is that Automount for removable Drives, Devices & Media in that combo is mediated via Thunar and NOT via /etc/fstab, autofs nor any other source. As long as Thunar and it's dependencies are setup correctly life is simple & it just works.

With Thunar open, go:–

• menu:Edit | Preferences

• select tab:Advanced

• (bottom of tab): Volume Management
  [if working, this provides a "Configure" link to the “Removable Drives and Media” setup]

That is the case for me now, but before the fix there was a sickly-coloured background which said:

That is more than a little sickly for folks like me that tend to stay away from bloated products like gvfs (wiki) virtual filesystem software for the GNOME desktop environment
Here is a before result on a search, with the fix after:

before

$ apt search gvfs | fgrep install
gimp/stable,stable-security,now 3.0.4-3+deb13u8 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs-common/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 all [installed,automatic]
gvfs-daemons/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs-libs/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]

after

$ sudo apt install gvfs-fuse gvfs-backends

$ apt search gvfs | fgrep install
gimp/stable,stable-security,now 3.0.4-3+deb13u8 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs-backends/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed]
gvfs-common/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 all [installed,automatic]
gvfs-daemons/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs-fuse/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed]
gvfs-libs/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
rygel/stable,now 0.44.2-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
xfce4-goodies/stable,now 4.20.0 amd64 [installed,automatic]

(CDs + DVDs + Blue-Rays now auto-mount & are accessible) Hooray!