I meant that when a user plugs a USB they probably want an immediate popup on the desktop and the ability to manage the files on the drive, or that they want to be able to see the wireless networks and configure them without switching to the root user, or even shutdown the computer with a button on the desktop.
The way this is done is with a message bus and other subsystems (there were consolekit, networkmanager, ...), and these don't really match the "Unix-way" of doing things. Though I don't consider this to be a big issue, some people do.
If you have a minimal distro and install a very basic environment, you'll often have to set up these to work if you want some of the above features. Ubuntu will already have all this set up though.
Ok, I understood why I was puzzled. Ubuntu opens a file manager window whenever I plug in a USB drive and it tells me about available WiFi networks. XFCE on my netbook does the same. Probably some other distro is more silent about those events.
The way this is done is with a message bus and other subsystems (there were consolekit, networkmanager, ...), and these don't really match the "Unix-way" of doing things. Though I don't consider this to be a big issue, some people do.
If you have a minimal distro and install a very basic environment, you'll often have to set up these to work if you want some of the above features. Ubuntu will already have all this set up though.