How will life be without gvfs?

tyder · 2026-03-17 16:13:05

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 · 2026-03-17 23:33:39

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 · 2026-03-18 14:23:36

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 (2026-03-18 14:28:22)

pcalvert · Yesterday 03:45:18

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.

tyder · Yesterday 08:28:55

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 · Yesterday 11:35:16

Hello:

tyder wrote:

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 (Yesterday 11:41:10)

tux_99 · Yesterday 12:49:17

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).

Altoid · Yesterday 21:31:24

Hello:

tux_99 wrote:

... you use Gnome or even just gnome-disks then I'm not surprised that removing gvfs gives you problems ...

Not only that.
If I do pkill gvfs.*, PCManFM will start it again.
Talk about invasive ...

To avoid the fuckups I have been getting I needed to at least disable gvfs-daemon.service.
Much to my chagrin, the only safe way I found on-line to do that was using systemctl, which I had to install.
Not happy about that. 8^/

When I ran it, I found that I also did not need to have these other services running:

# systemctl --user | grep gvfs
--- snip ---
gvfs-afc-volume-monitor.service	  loaded inactive dead   Virtual filesystem service - Apple File Conduit monitor
gvfs-goa-volume-monitor.service   loaded inactive dead   Virtual filesystem service - GNOME Online Accounts monitor
--- snip ---
#

So I disabled the ones I am certain I do not need:

# systemctl --user disable gvfs-daemon.service 
# systemctl --user disable gvfs-afc-volume-monitor.service 
# systemctl --user disable gvfs-goa-volume-monitor.service

Having to use a systemd tool utility to avoid running unneeded gvfs services is a very bad sign of things to come.
Grin and bear it, I guess.

I'll report if and when I find something is not working properly and in the mean time will see if getting rid of PCManFM cleans up some more of all this gvfs crap.

Sad state of affairs these are.

Best,

A.

brocashelm · Yesterday 21:45:24

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.

See also this article on why Udisks2 is crap and is only just another Red Hat subversion (much like Systemd and Wayland). Still true fourteen years later.

tyder · Today 12:21:16

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.

greenjeans · Today 14:46:29

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.

greenjeans · Today 14:55:07

Also, I may be the outlier here, and everybody knows I hate what gnome has become, i'm even to the point where i'm writing my own software specifically to take the place of gnome crap, that being said, gvfs and udisks are 2 that have never given me any trouble, and make for a lot of convenience in my system.

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.

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#1 2026-03-17 16:13:05

How will life be without gvfs?

#2 2026-03-17 23:33:39

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#3 2026-03-18 14:23:36

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#4 Yesterday 03:45:18

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#5 Yesterday 08:28:55

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#6 Yesterday 11:35:16

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#7 Yesterday 12:49:17

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#8 Yesterday 21:31:24

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#9 Yesterday 21:45:24

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#10 Today 12:21:16

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#11 Today 14:46:29

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

#12 Today 14:55:07

Re: How will life be without gvfs?

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