removable storage usability, devd, hald and X11-desktop in general

[Harry Schmalzbauer]

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