Sorting Hard Drives in the GNOME Nautilus Sidebar: What Broke and How to Fix It
The label trick is broken — here’s what’s happening
If you’ve been using GNOME Disks to rename partitions so they sort nicely in the Nautilus sidebar, that stopped working in recent GNOME releases. The drives section no longer sorts by label. Order is now driven by device enumeration — basically the sequence the kernel sees your disks at boot — which is pretty useless when you have a half-dozen drives and care which is which at a glance.
This was a real regression. The label approach required no config files and worked reliably for years.
How the old approach worked
Nautilus used to sort the drives section alphabetically by filesystem label. Rename a partition 01_Games or A_Backup in GNOME Disks, and the sidebar reflected that order. Three drives labeled 01_System, 02_Data, 03_Backup appeared in exactly that sequence — no scripts, no terminal.
Changing a label in GNOME Disks is simple: select the partition, click the gear icon, choose “Edit Filesystem…”, and update the label field. Two clicks and a text box.
At some point in the recent GNOME release cycle the drive ordering in the sidebar stopped respecting that alphabetical label logic. Labels still show up as display names, but the order is now arbitrary from the user’s side. The upstream Nautilus GitLab has an open item about sidebar modernization (issue #577) that covers this and related gaps, and a GNOME Discourse thread has specifically requested a native sort option for the drives section — but nothing is merged as of July 2026.
Workaround: udev rules with UDISKS_NAME
The most reliable workaround right now uses udev rules to assign a custom display name per device. The UDISKS_NAME environment variable tells udisks2 — the daemon GNOME consults to track mounted devices — what name to show in file manager UIs. Prefix those names with numbers and the sidebar sorts them in that order.
1. Find stable device identifiers
Use UUIDs. A partition’s UUID doesn’t change between reboots, unlike device nodes such as /dev/sda, which can shift if you add or remove disks. Run this to list them:
lsblk -o NAME,UUID,LABELCopy the UUID for each partition you want to control.
2. Write the rules file
Create /etc/udev/rules.d/99-drive-names.rules. Each line targets one partition by UUID and assigns a display name:
ENV{ID_FS_UUID}=="a1b2c3d4-...", ENV{UDISKS_NAME}="01_System"
ENV{ID_FS_UUID}=="e5f6g7h8-...", ENV{UDISKS_NAME}="02_Games"
ENV{ID_FS_UUID}=="i9j0k1l2-...", ENV{UDISKS_NAME}="03_Backup"The == operator matches a value; the bare = assigns one. Name your file with a prefix higher than 80 so it loads after the default udisks2 rules at /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/80-udisks2.rules. The 99- prefix works fine for this.
3. Reload and trigger
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm triggerLog out and back in. Your drives should now appear in the sidebar in numbered order.
One caveat: if a drive auto-mounts before udev finishes applying the rules, the old name might flash briefly on first plug-in. It resolves on its own — nothing to fix.
Alternative: bookmarks instead of the drives section
If you mount internal drives to fixed paths like /mnt/games or /mnt/media, there’s a simpler route. Add those paths as bookmarks in Nautilus with Ctrl+D and drag them into whatever order you want. The bookmarks section respects manual reordering. No config files, no rules.
The trade-off is straightforward: unmounted drives won’t show up as bookmarks. For always-attached internal drives this works cleanly. For removable or conditionally mounted disks it falls apart.
Upvoting the feature request
If a native sort option matters to you, adding a thumbs-up reaction on the relevant Nautilus GitLab issues signals demand to the dev team. The GNOME Discourse thread also has ongoing activity — a comment there keeps the request visible and costs nothing.