[Slightly-OT] On usability: managing usb devices & network profiles in a ion3 environment

Hi,

I am just curious to know what do ion3 users do to manage painlessly
usb devices and network profiles.

I've done my tinkering with udev to configure my usb gadgets, but when
I have to read others' pendrives I simply spend an embarassingly long
time trying to figure out what node the device is attached to (plus
additional time spent on mount points & permissions issues). I've
heard that graphical environments like gnome or kde do that quite
automatically, but I don't see why a non-graphical environment could
not do the same thing.

The same goes for managing network profiles in a laptop. Gnome has
network-manager, a graphical tool that seems to do a good job. Again,
there is no need to rely on a widget to do this kind of task, but I
haven't found yet a convincing non-graphical solution.

Any ideas?

Best