kio-fuse is the KDE equivalent of GNOME’s GVfs, which like the GNOME version substantially improves the experience of interacting with remote files using non-native software by exposing the remote file and its parent folder to the app using a FUSE interface.
This package is available in the repos, but not installed automatically with the KDE-Desktop metapackage. I would like to request that it be installed when installing this metapackage, to improve the out-of-the-box experience for KDE Plasma users and bring the Plasma session to feature parity with the user experience for users of the GNOME desktop and its forks (which get GVfs pre-installed by default).
i will install kde in VM and check this… i do see also that we install GVfs in base group, and it is not needed for qt-based Desktop so w need to change this .. but it will need some research first..
So, I’m looking through and I don’t have this package installed, and I can’t seem to feel like I have needed this or I’m missing something?
In essence of the more minimal approach to Endeavour, why does the average person need this? Or why should I add this to my computer? Since we’re talking about blanket adding it to all KDE, I guess I was just wondering.
It is not that difficult to bring the Plasma session to feature parity with the user experience for users of the GNOME desktop in this context- what’s wrong about sudo pacman -S kio-fuse?
Which would lead to the situation it wouldn’t be possible to remove that package without removing the plasma desktop?
It seems like a much better solution than the current solution of installing a suite of gvfs packages by default with kde/plasma.
Removing the plasma-desktop metapackage won’t remove the plasma desktop or anything else except the metapackage itself. So if you want to remove it, you can remove the metapackage and then remove the package you want to remove.
In the worst case scenario, you may need to mark a handful of packages explicitly installed so they don’t removed as orphans.
So kio-fuse is basically a drop in replacement for
gvfs 1.46.2-1
gvfs-afc 1.46.2-1
gvfs-goa 1.46.2-1
gvfs-google 1.46.2-1
gvfs-gphoto2 1.46.2-1
gvfs-mtp 1.46.2-1
gvfs-nfs 1.46.2-1
gvfs-smb 1.46.2-1
?
Not being installed by default means you need to 1. know it exists 2. know it’s not installed and 3. go out of your way to install it.
If you work with non-KDE software and remote files accessed through Dolphin, kio-fuse makes the experience much more pleasant, same as GVfs with remote files and non-GNOME software accessed through Nautilus. If you haved this use case, you benefit from it being handled well by default without you having to go install something special.
I know this is a philosophical thing, but my thinking was that because EndeavourOS has an installer, it aspires to be more user-friendly than Arch is, and one of the aspects of user-friendliness is pre-installing useful software that the user benefits from having–especially backend infrastructure stuff.
Got it.
I’m still confused what exactly these packages are responsible for tbh. Without them i wouldn’t be able to mount a smb or nfs share into a folder? Is that correct? Or is that solely for applications accessing said shares directly saving me from manually mounting shares?
Absolutely agree. My view is such things are always worth a discussion though. Like, another thing i don’t quite understand is why pipewire is installed and running these days on arch and all these arch based distros without fulfilling any obvious purpose.
I’m still confused what exactly these packages are responsible for tbh. Without them i wouldn’t be able to mount a smb or nfs share into a folder? Is that correct? Or is that solely for applications accessing said shares directly saving me from manually mounting shares?
When you don’t have kio-fuse installed, and you use, say, Blender or LibreOffice to open a file on a Samba share you’ve accessed from Dolphin, the app gets asked to open a smb:// URL. These apps don’t include samba clients, so what ends up happening is that KIO downloads the file locally to /tmp and passes the app that path. This works, but it means that under the hood, you’re not actually modifying the file on the samba share; you’re modifying a local copy. When you save the file, KIO detects that the local copy has changed, and asks you if you want to replace the remote copy with the modified local copy.
This process presents multiple problems, among them:
It’s annoying for the user to have to confirm what it is they just asked to do.
If the remote file was modified by someone else, your local changes will silently clobber their changes.
If the file is very large (e.g. a video file on a NAS) the local copy operations will take ages and ages. You will be annoyed by the time it actually opens, and re-saving the file will take a long time. The state could get out of sync if yo make another change and save while the first saved copy is still re-uploading back to the server.
If you use the app’s own “Open” dialog, it won’t be able to find files located next to the file it opened, because the share has not been mounted anywhere in a way that the app can see.
kio-fuse solves all these problems. When Blender or LibreOffice (or whatever) is passed a smb:// URL, kio-fuse notices and silently mounts the share that the file is localed on as a FUSE mount, and passes the app a path to the file on the FUSE mount–just like GVfs does. This allows all three of the above-mentioned problems to be solved.
Really, the fact that kio-fuse is a separate package and not included in kio itself is mostly an implementation detail.
I installed kio-fuse but because i have no current use for it i don’t need it and it’s use probably requires that i install some other packages in order for it to be used. I have uninstalled it after without issue on kde. I don’t think most users would be using samba and or file sharing necessarily at least in my world. I don’t see it. Sure it’s useful if you are installing Samba and using file sharing for a purpose. I can see it being useful if needed but like @dalto say’s . What is wrong with sudo pacman -S kio-fuse? This is just another one of those packages that yes it is useful but is it really necessary to include it? Personally I’d rather see a wiki on file sharing and samba etc with emphasis on different deskstops what is needed. Just my opinion.
There are a lot of people who get into starting to use Linux. They don’t use these things. They just want to learn to use an installed system. Then when they want to do something specific they have to figure out how to do it and what is required to do it and what is the best way to do it. I guess i would be on the fence on this one. It’s a very small package so it’s not a big deal but, It’s not going to help a user who doesn’t know what’s needed for it’s use? So does that mean we include samba and what ever else so it’s useable?
I actually CAN take use of it, I use Samba literally every day, at home AND at work. I just installed this on my work computer (kio-fuse conflicts with fuse in Ubuntu and requires you to uninstall fuse, but…ok) and my Latitude 7490 personal to test with it, but I had previously never heard of this.
So while I’m one of the people that can DEFINITELY benefit from this, I agree that it’s probably not going to be something that sufficient quantities of people use so also agree with @dalto on this one.