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tyder

Member

From: Oslo, Norway

Registered: 2016-12-19

Posts: 50  

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: 114  

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 (Yesterday 14:28:22)

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

pcalvert

Member

Registered: 2017-05-15

Posts: 305  

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

I created a stripped down Debian live CD back in 2017. I wanted to make sure that it would actually fit on a CD, so I excluded as much unnecessary stuff as possible, including gvfs. The lack of gvfs didn't cause any problems that I am aware of.

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tyder

Member

From: Oslo, Norway

Registered: 2016-12-19

Posts: 50  

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

Thanks for the replies! :-)

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.

That's very good for general, especially more occasional, use, but in my particular use cases, it hasn't been so useful. I have ended up doing (lots of) manual mounts for necessary control, for example. I think it has something to do with the 'need to be open'-thing too. Most volumes are unmounted most of the time etc.

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.

Good to hear! My intuition is that I should rather make the mounting/unmounting more efficient than rely on gvfs automation.   And for me, the default is for services to be turned off when not in use: Boot partition/bootloader/initrd&kernel unmounted, init scripts rested when they have done their thing, media offline when not in use etc. Some of it, I think may be general good practice. The rest mostly related to workflow and reducing the impacts of own user errors.

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,990  

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

Hello:

How will life be without gvfs?

Wanting a gnome-crap clean system, I purged most everything but when I purged gvfs I started having all sorts of issues.
One was that gnome-disks (the only useful gnome application I know of) would not work.

So I installed it again but then it screwed up my connection to a couple of android based thinguies (phone and tablet) when using PCManFM but not Thunar which I don't like as much but cannot get rid of as it is part of the actual XFCE clusterfuck.

I have since found that I can solve that by doing a "unplug thinguie, kill PCManFM, plug thinguie again, start PCManFM" dance.
Gets old in less that 30s.

I have also found that if I do pkill gvfs.* and run mtp-detect, then everything works fine.
Quite damning for gvfs ...
Note: without mtp-detect it does not work.

So ...

Q: how can I stop the gvfs service from running?
It is not listed when I run service --status-all | grep gvfs

But I found all these files which may hold a clue:

/usr/lib/systemd/user/gvfs-afc-volume-monitor.service
/usr/lib/systemd/user/gvfs-daemon.service                   <- ###### this?
/usr/lib/systemd/user/gvfs-goa-volume-monitor.service
/usr/lib/systemd/user/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor.service
/usr/lib/systemd/user/gvfs-metadata.service
/usr/lib/systemd/user/gvfs-mtp-volume-monitor.service
/usr/lib/systemd/user/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor.service

~$ cat /usr/lib/systemd/user/gvfs-daemon.service

[Unit]
Description=Virtual filesystem service
PartOf=graphical-session.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/libexec/gvfsd
Type=dbus
BusName=org.gtk.vfs.Daemon
Slice=session.slice
~$ 

How to (safely) deal with this so it will not run at boot and allow me to check if anything goes south?

Thanks in advance.

Best,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (Today 11:41:10)

tux_99

Member

Registered: 2025-06-17

Posts: 114  

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

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).

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