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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%. The OS settings are conveniently located in a sensibly organized system settings manager and it works great. Then you need to mount a network drive (temporarily or permanently) and simply cannot do so in a GUI. If you're comfortable dealing with that small handful of outlier tasks (and if you're here, you can probably manage), then they're all already there.

[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them

[1] that is, they require the command line

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IIRC in Thunar you just open a dialog and paste the connection string and you're done. Pretty much the same as in Windows but you don't need to execute some icky looking binary from some web page to e.g. get support for sshfs.

That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.

But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.

I kind of disagree that it is done easily in Windows, network drives are pretty cursed everywhere in my experience.

But yeah, I'm a professional who lives in multiplexed terminals and none of the people who I've helped migrate to Linux were keen on NFS, CIFS, SMB and so on, so it's not like I have a solid grasp on the graphical tooling available for such things.

It has been much rarer for people to come back to me with problems after I've helped them move to Linux compared to the Windows users, though.

Dolphin can mount network drives just fine?

Yes, but I don't believe it can do so permanently. And by that I mean, solely through the UI, connect to a network drive and have it persist across reboots. You can do that in the Windows or Mac file explorers.

My initial comment muddied that complaint. You can do it transiently in the UI in Dophin.

Works for me, I have my nextcloud webdav saved there since I didn't want to deal with any client bloat. It's not only persisted across reboots, but persisted across platform upgrades (I run fedora KDE)

> The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%.

Lol! You should try being a comedian.

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