From owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Sat May 19 18:36:04 2018 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@mailman.ysv.freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2610:1c1:1:606c::19:1]) by mailman.ysv.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7A467EDDA36 for ; Sat, 19 May 2018 18:36:04 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@omnilan.de) Received: from mx0.gentlemail.de (mx0.gentlemail.de [IPv6:2a00:e10:2800::a130]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (Client did not present a certificate) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id EE77879D75 for ; Sat, 19 May 2018 18:36:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@omnilan.de) Received: from mh0.gentlemail.de (ezra.dcm1.omnilan.net [IPv6:2a00:e10:2800::a135]) by mx0.gentlemail.de (8.14.5/8.14.5) with ESMTP id w4JIa0ZR074861 for ; Sat, 19 May 2018 20:36:00 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from freebsd@omnilan.de) Received: from titan.inop.mo1.omnilan.net (s1.omnilan.de [217.91.127.234]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by mh0.gentlemail.de (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id BDCC2D1F for ; Sat, 19 May 2018 20:36:00 +0200 (CEST) To: freebsd-stable From: Harry Schmalzbauer Subject: removable storage usability, devd, hald and X11-desktop in general Organization: OmniLAN Message-ID: <5beffba2-d2d5-689a-9cb1-054379f55adf@omnilan.de> Date: Sat, 19 May 2018 20:35:59 +0200 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.7.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Language: en-US X-Greylist: Sender IP whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-4.2.7 (mx0.gentlemail.de [IPv6:2a00:e10:2800::a130]); Sat, 19 May 2018 20:36:00 +0200 (CEST) X-Milter: Spamilter (Reciever: mx0.gentlemail.de; Sender-ip: ; Sender-helo: mh0.gentlemail.de; ) X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 19 May 2018 18:36:04 -0000 Hello, after 10 years I replaced my personal desktop machine (FreeBSD8 -> FreeBSD12). While aware of OS progress, I haven't followed any development on the X11 planet. To my surprise, things were in better shape 10 years ago, regarding desktop usability. Biggest question: How are useres expected to handle removable media? I'm a happy user of autofs(5) in several environments (mostly for NFS mounts), but I'm not aware of any helper tool which enables _users_ to unmount before pulling the UFD. I've heard of PC-BSD and Lumina (see later why I haven't really tried out the modern "light" desktops) and I think I remember having read they utilize devd(8).  But again, how to unmount? 10 years ago my choice was xdm with xfce4-session, supplemented by selected gnome tools (eog, evince ...) and firefox/thunderbird. KDE4 was working well too, the PIM suite was a full/over-featured solution, yet acceptable performance.  I liked many aspects of Kmail, this was really full featured and I thought the new Qt5 based version will become my new X default MUA (since I'm very satisfied how Qt5 performs on my old Jolla phone) But today, Kmail is completele unusable thanks to akonadi – likewise others of the PIM suite (MySQL database grew beyond quota for only two folders of my primary IMAP postbox; MySQL as dependency for a MUA is ridiculous anyways, but a index of several gigabytes?!?! if it read all folders, I would have needed a second ssd) My prerequisite is still three seperate x screens. Since no window manager of the modern "light" desktops like LXDE, LXQt, Lumina could handle my triple-head Xorg setup, I came exactly to the same result like 10 years ago: xfce4. It has served me an incredible well job for 10 years.  The only usability flaw was Thunar for me, because of it's feature limitations. I really expected that in the mean time, it was possible to store directory dependent sorting preferences – wrong.  Much more frustrating, on FreeBSD, there's no thunar-volman anymore (which wasn't really stable with hald(8), but as far as I'm aware sysutils/hal has been greatly improved some years ago – which I never tried on my old machine). Sorry for throwing in another topic, but where's $PFREFIX/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/*.conf.sample? It took me the better part of a day to _search the web_ in order to get my keyboard working.  I'm still unsure if I did it how it's supposed to be done on FreeBSD these days – without hal but wich auto-detetction. No idea what the devd(8) dependency of the port controls.  How does X interact with devd(8)??? In my opinion, the Xorg(-server) ports need much more attention regarding documentation.  Of course I could have used xfce-settings to adjust my keyboard layout, but when it comes to the mouse, I need to set  AccelerationProfile, AdaptiveDeceleration and ConstantDeceleration which isn't covered by xfce-settings and much more important, I want to be able to fire up twm(1) and also have my keyboard and mouse aedequate supported.  In my opinion, these settings have to be done in the xserver config.  And that was really hard to find out how to on FreeBSD these days. Then, there's slim(1).  It incorporates ConsoleKit, so it's my preference over xdm(1). But: It's incredibly the only authentication mask I ever used, which doesn't handle the vert-tab-key as user/password selector. Don't get me wrong, thanks for slim, it is exactly what I need, but I regularly log in as "myuseraccountmynotsosecretpasswordanymore".  I could have bet my tab-key is broken; still can't believe there's not even a config switch to enabyle this vereywhere-else behaviour. If somebody's still reading and totally agreeing and fighting the same usability wars, here's another one: Inconsistency at it's best: gtk-file-chooser.  (In order to walk trough the filesystem tree from /) Select "Other Places", _single_ click "Computer", and then you have to _double_ click for entering directories!?!?! I always disliked the double click and for most parts of my X application collection I always foud a GUI helper to switch to single click, but not for the gtk-file-chooser; neither for gtk2 nor these days for gtk3.  Maybe you have had time to read the developer repositories and know what to put into "gtkfilechooser.ini" and want to share? I'm happy to share my Xorg-server setup for a haswell triple head setup on request. For those who agree with my _user_ usability view, as a summary, can you tell  me: · How do you access mobile media like FAT UFDs and NTFS HDDs? · How do you access aribtrary DVDs (yes, besides data, I'm also curious if someone watches video discs and how)? · How to use geli(8)+nonZFS based native mass storage? (I don't expect there's a ZFS pool import covering method, but for UFS e.g.?) Any experience report welcome, also and especially from Lumina/ROX/LXQt/etc. users! One last exclusion: Anything depending on gnome-vfs can't handle my ZFS aclmode setup (utilizing chmod in a way which would destroy my ACL), so this was no option.  Haven't checked if gvfs shows the same insane chmod(2) utilization... Thanks, -harry