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tyder

Member

From: Oslo, Norway

Registered: 2016-12-19

Posts: 47  

How will life be without gvfs?

How will life be without gvfs?
I'm about to find out for myself. It turned out that I didn't have to remove any userspace package to drop gvfs.
Which was kind of great surprise to me, I had the impression that 'everything' needed gvfs now and then.
In turn, it may indicate that the services gvfs provides, are not necessarily provided in an optimal way.
It's the old swiss army knife principle, which may mean jack of all trades, master of none.
And to some people, a swiss army knife is just what they need. Not to me, even though I happen to use them quite a lot ;-)

laurie_dev1

Member

Registered: 2026-01-31

Posts: 17  

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

If you only need gvfs for external drive mounting and you dont mind the terminal there is a program called pmount which mounts external drives with user permissions/

pmount /dev/sdb1

mounts it to /media/sdb1
Or you can go old school and just use fstab for all external mount requirements.

GVfs comes with a set of back-ends, including trash support, SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, SMB, and local data via Udev integration, OBEX, MTP and others.
So just depends on your use case.

tux_99

Member

Registered: 2025-06-17

Posts: 111  

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

I have been running a desktop PC with XFCE with gvfs uninstalled since a long time and I have never noticed any problems apart from the fact that I have to mount removable drives manually.

'pmount' as suggested is a good alternative to make manual mounting of removable drives easier, but of course you can also just use the standard 'mount' command.

Last edited by tux_99 (Today 14:28:22)

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“Either the users control the program – or the program controls the users” Richard Stallman