On my desktop, the UI can freeze for hours and require a reboot from TTY. The 'recent files' submenu in software seems to trigger repeated connection attempts. This is a major usability issue, and probably why FUSE is used by KDE. [...]
You are right, a lost SMB connection can take a long time to recover from. I just made the mistake again of switching off my Windows 10 PC without severing an existing SMB connection from my Linux laptop. It took me several minutes to tear the connection down from a terminal window. I wasn't even using the connection actively, but I had a Caja window (MATE's file manager) open on that mount, and "umount -t cifs" kept complaining that the connection was still in use, so it refused to close it. I even clicked on NetworkManager's "Enable networking" option, in order to disable network support completely, in the hope that this way all internal state machines would timeout or fail immediately, to no avail. Now that you talk about FUSE, I tried using GVfs for a while, but it is full of long-standing issues too. I kept some notes about it inside the comments of this script: https://github.com/rdiez/Tools/blob/master/MountWindowsShares/mount-windows-shares-gvfs.sh I wonder whether the KDE way is better, and how I could use it myself. I have had many issues with KDE over the years, so a long time ago I decided to stop using it. At the moment, I sway between Xfce and MATE, as both still have their share of problems, but that is a different subject altogether. I have heard that KDE has its own "KIO Slaves", which would be the equivalent to GNOME's GVfs. Do you know if it is really more reliable for CIFS / SMB connections? Can you install and use it without installing the whole KDE desktop? I also wonder about installing an SSHFS server on the Windows boxes. I tried Cygwin's SSH server on Windows 7, and it worked rather well, but I haven't tried its SSHFS support yet. Modern versions of Windows bring their own SSH server, I wonder if that would be more reliable for Linux clients, and whether it integrates with Windows security (so that you do not have to distribute SSH keys around). Best regards, rdiez
