Hmm ...
I have so many, but the root cause to any of them has eluded me from an early age.

Most of them can be found in any edition of Jon Winokur's 'The Portable Curmudgeon'.

That is because I have gvfs installed and you do not.

I had to reinstall it.

Best,

A.

Whatever for?
We're just exchanging ideas.

And in a civilised manner.  ;^D

I also worked for me till I uninstalled it but quite a few things stopped working properly.
So I installed it again and I then had other issues.
Like I mentioned, getting rid of PCManFM solved the problem.

No need to justify anything, to me or anyone else.

My objections to gvfs are based on it being wired, like the OP wrote, to be a jack-of-all-trades.
Does that approach to writing Linux applications sound familiar to you?

Best,

A.

I'm not a fan of its key bindings and only know the basic ones so ranger is not for me

.

I can do most everything I need to do in it with a mouse, it even displays pics.

Back on-topic: I'm sorry Altoid, but gvfs works really well with PcmanFM for me, and it's not even running until I open the file-manager for the first time in a session (i'm not using the file-manager to run the Desktop, so it's not on all the time either).

For me it's crucial to my workflow to be able to quickly access other partitions. If I could figure out a good solution to dropping it I would likely do so.

We (YT included, obviously) seem to have drifted off a bit.
Happens ...  8^°

The problem I have detected is that even with the use of systemctl, there does not seem to be a way to keep the gvfs.* services from running and if you purge it, at least in Xfce, it screws up things.

Talk about being 'plumbed in'. 8^/

I'm not sure but it seems that dbus (surpise!!!) will start all of them even if they are masked.
See here:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1285637 … art-0.html

$ ls -1 /usr/share/dbus-1/services | grep vfs
org.gtk.vfs.AfcVolumeMonitor.service
org.gtk.vfs.Daemon.service
org.gtk.vfs.GPhoto2VolumeMonitor.service
org.gtk.vfs.GoaVolumeMonitor.service
org.gtk.vfs.MTPVolumeMonitor.service
org.gtk.vfs.Metadata.service
org.gtk.vfs.UDisks2VolumeMonitor.service
$ 

Like I mentioned earlier, PCManFM had some issue with gvfs which I solved by purging it and installing a replacement.

But the uneeded gvfs crap is still running.
ie: org.gtk.vfs.AfcVolumeMonitor.service and org.gtk.vfs.GoaVolumeMonitor.service

Any ideas?

Best,

A.

Like Altoid said, mc is inspired by Norton Commander and that's what I was using on MS DOS / Win 3.1 before switching to Linux in the mid 90s so that's what I prefer.

mc is one of the first things I have always installed on any PC, it has been that way ever since I can remember.
Although at that time it was Norton Commander on MS-DOS.

I always use it to ssh into my proto-NAS (WD MBL on OpenWRT) or when do any maintenance on my box, RPi or 1000HE.

I guess it comes down to unconscious preferences (?).
But yes, it is probably the best out there.

A.

Well ...
It seems that, independently of what I did with sysmctl, things were not working as expected.
ie: same old gvfs screwing up things.

So I purged (with exreme prejudice) PCManFM and problem solved.
I then installed xfe, in my opinion a much underrated file manager that needs (?) gvfs but does not screw around with my mounting Android devices; lightweight and highly configurable.

I downloaded the latest version (2.1.5 *.run file) from sourceforge and installed it.
No issues for the time being.

I would also ditch Thunar but it seems not viable if using Xfce.

Will report if and when I find something is not working properly.

Best,

A.

Not necessarily so.

In my case, not hate as such.
I came across it many years ago when I was gifted a laptop (486?) and went looking for Linux to install.
There was something about it I disliked.
Gut feeling? No idea.

gvfs started acting up when I reinstalled it, fortunately I put paid to that by disabling the offending 'service' with systemctl, a systemd tool.   

I am 'on the fence' so to speak about the rest of the gvfs crap running in my box.
While I both understand and sympathise with what you say, as far as I am concerned the less gnome crap we have in our Devuan box, the better.

As for udisks2 and having read that post linked to by brocashelm, if there is something to replace it I think it is a good idea.

Because we must return to the KISS principle if we want to continue to use our boxes as we see fit.

I arrived late to MSDOS and soon came W3.11, which I actually liked.
The when W95 came along, I had no choice but to use it at work.
When I mentioned this to one of the chaps I knew in IT, he said that W95 was a fantastic user interface, the future of 'computing'. 

At that time, being a raw beginner in the use of a PC, I still remember the thought that crossed my mind sometime later:

"There will come a time when those who actually master the command line will be the only ones to have access to anything related to IT on their own terms."

And here we are ...
As always, just my $0.02

Best,

A.

When I boot up my system, I want every partition and connected device to show up in that treeview, and I want to open them with a single click without any hoopla, I just don't have time in my day to work any other way, I work fast and the system either needs to keep up or get the **** out of the way and let me work. So far gvfs and udisks comply just fine with those requirements.

Oh well if you use Gnome or even just gnome-disks then I'm not surprised that removing gvfs gives you problems, my experience without gvfs is purely with a clean XFCE, no gnome desktop stuff installed (other than polkit-gnome and gnome-keyring-daemon which AFAIR were installed by default with XFCE).

You can replace polkit-gnome with mate-polkit or LXpolkit, you just need an authentication agent, any one will do.

The gnome keyring app is flawed and buggy, I got rid of that quite a while ago. Just store passwords in a local encrypted file, I made my own app for that.

Personally, I got rid of Udisks2 (which also gets rid of GVfs) and have my USB flash drives automatically mount with the help of Udevil's Devmon running on a non-root level, optionally doing this through SpaceFM (for quick and efficient syncing and unmounting functionality baked in). Never had any issues that way, and I use a plugin for trash functionality.

Good to know there are alternatives for less manual use cases than mine. After years of frustrating experiences similar to @Altoid's, only complete removal of such stuff seems to give me less grievances that just putting up with it.

For the Devuan project, there may be a decision to make: Fix upstream first or next? Just adding gvfs-free alternatives and pointing to lots of successful users may be a smoother approach to introducing a change upstream than starting with a more principle-based discussion there.