My understanding of Linux programming is that it’s mostly done in a code editor, then compiled on the command line.
That’s not really true. You can do that, but with most IDEs (and some text editors) you really don’t need to do that. You can do everything from the IDE.
I’m aware that cmake exists, and I’ve used it a bit, but I don’t like it. VS lets me just drop a .h and .cpp file into the solution explorer and I’m good-to-go. Is there really no graphical alternative for Linux?
It depends on the IDE and how it handles project files. Nowadays Qt Creator for example can just create your source code files and automatically add them to the generated project CMake. I’m pretty sure other IDEs or text editors have this functionality when paired with CMake or Meson too.
It must be noted that if the IDE has some custom project file manager (like Visual Studio does with sln and vcproj files) and you use it exclusively, you’ll likely restrict your project to one platform and one IDE. Using something like CMake or Meson will make it easier to do crossplatform development and will let your users build the project without needing that specific IDE.
Personally I like modern CMake, the problem is that you’ll see a lot of projects in the wild doing old CMake style, which is awful. Meson is okay, although it feels very Pythonic to me and lacks some features I use for Qt stuff.
What’s used under the hood for this is udisks, the same thing used by other file managers to achieve mounting capabilities. It allows you to mount devices without needing to mess with something cryptic and archaic like fstab and doesn’t require root.
You can always keep using fstab of course since it works, but in that case you probably also want to use fstab systemd integration.
Please report your issues on https://bugs.kde.org so they can actually get fixed!