If they want to enjoy gnome and hate criticism of it, that is their problem.

As for me, any software that is built like corporate software needs to be used with caution as it is likely crap.

If its a game I might tolerate it to a point, but if I don't have interest in it, like Desktop Environments, then i say... screw that.

And yes, I include even Lumina desktop.

Its the least bad of them, but I do just fine with jwm and jwmkit.

To try to shed some light on this I searched DDG for Is Gnome bloated. The answer appears to be 'yes':

I am happy to leave others more qualified than me to scrap over the reasonableness of the statement.

That's a hell of a picture.

But yes, redhat's crap is like sticking a piece of toast with cream cheese into a vhs slot.

Very dumb and shocking that anyone would think such is okay.

As long as Thunar and it's dependencies are setup correctly life is simple & it just works.

This is an oxymoron. GVFS is the dependency of thunar that makes this "just work". The "bloat" you want to stay away from is the very thing that makes "life is simple" possible.

"bloat" is code that does not provide sufficient functionality to justify its size, complexity, or performance impact. Clearly you value GUI automounting from your file manager and are willing to install GVFS to provide it. Therefore, GVFS is not bloat.

So what is so "bloated" about gvfs? Its from Gnome, ok. But its not the desktop. I recently looked at Gnome again because some people were raving about the desktop, but its not my beer.

$ neofetch
   ..,,;;;::;,..                   alexk@ng3 
           `':ddd;:,.              --------- 
                 `'dPPd:,.         OS: Devuan GNU/Linux 6 (excalibur) x86_64 
                     `:b$$b`.      Model: 90BJ008CUK Lenovo H30-05 
                        'P$$$d`    Kernel: 6.12.90+deb13.1-amd64 
                         .$$$$$`   Uptime: 6 hours, 45 mins 
                         ;$$$$$P   Packages: 3248 (dpkg) 
                      .:P$$$$$$`   Shell: bash 5.2.37 
                  .,:b$$$$$$$;'    Resolution: 1920x1080 
             .,:dP$$$$$$$$b:'      DE: Xfce 4.20 
      .,:;db$$$$$$$$$$Pd'`         WM: Xfwm4 
 ,db$$$$$$$$$$$$$$b:'`             WM Theme: Default 
:$$$$$$$$$$$$b:'`                  Theme: Clearlooks-Phenix-Sapphire [GTK2/3] 
 `$$$$$bd:''`                      Icons: oxygen [GTK2/3] 
   `'''`                           Terminal: xfce4-terminal 
                                   Terminal Font: Monospace 12 
                                   CPU: AMD A8-7410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics (4) @ 2.200GHz 
                                   GPU: AMD ATI Radeon R4/R5 Graphics 
                                   Memory: 1556MiB / 7362MiB

Somewhere after a successful upgrade to Excalibur and (I think) a kernel update I discovered that, whilst my 2GB USB-Storage was automounted + auto-accessible via Thunar & could be unmounted via GUI, the same was NO LONGER true for CDROM / DVD / Blue-Ray external devices connected to the desktop via USB. iirc the same was true for a Seagate 2TB external FAT32 usb-connected HDD (I may not have checked that one before the fix).

I'm in the middle of preparing for imminent upgrade to kitchen + house & my time is limited, but I checked the Byte Computer that I've been upgrading since January — it needs Chromium + Thunderbird sync and we shall have lift-off — and sure enough that shows the identical problem as the 10-year old Lenovo that I'm working on right now.

After a couple of days of going down rabbit holes on the Byte I transferred back to the Lenovo and hey!, after yet another trip down a rabbit-hole I got a conclusive fix. So here it is:-

Login for me is SLIM, Desktop is xfce4 whilst the File Manager is Thunar. The important thing to realise is that Automount for removable Drives, Devices & Media in that combo is mediated via Thunar and NOT via /etc/fstab, autofs nor any other source. As long as Thunar and it's dependencies are setup correctly life is simple & it just works.

With Thunar open, go:–

• menu:Edit | Preferences

• select tab:Advanced

• (bottom of tab): Volume Management
  [if working, this provides a "Configure" link to the “Removable Drives and Media” setup]

That is the case for me now, but before the fix there was a sickly-coloured background which said:

That is more than a little sickly for folks like me that tend to stay away from bloated products like gvfs (wiki) virtual filesystem software for the GNOME desktop environment
Here is a before result on a search, with the fix after:

before

$ apt search gvfs | fgrep install
gimp/stable,stable-security,now 3.0.4-3+deb13u8 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs-common/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 all [installed,automatic]
gvfs-daemons/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs-libs/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]

after

$ sudo apt install gvfs-fuse gvfs-backends

$ apt search gvfs | fgrep install
gimp/stable,stable-security,now 3.0.4-3+deb13u8 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs-backends/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed]
gvfs-common/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 all [installed,automatic]
gvfs-daemons/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gvfs-fuse/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed]
gvfs-libs/stable,now 1.57.2-2+deb13u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
rygel/stable,now 0.44.2-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
xfce4-goodies/stable,now 4.20.0 amd64 [installed,automatic]

(CDs + DVDs + Blue-Rays now auto-mount & are accessible) Hooray!