Every time I try to post something I get slapped by the hand of Linux Keeps Breaking Things for No Reason.
I cannot drag images from a samba share from nautilus to firefox to put in a post.
I think it's because it's not actually mounted. The paths I get if I try and grab it is smb://the server/the/path/to/something which is not a file path.
Okay, fine on windows, because you have shit like \\server\whatever which windows itself resolves for you. But you can't fucking open(2) something with smb:// in it, so naturally they can't allow dragging and dropping it as a file path! Duh, silly.
But I do not care if it is a file path or not. If it was mounted, like we've been able to do in userspace with shit like udisks for like ten Goddamn years now, then it would just work. I can't open the network path to my big storage in rawtherapee because it doesn't understand the path either. There is some kind of path, because I can open a terminal, but rawtherapee doesn't understand it (it's like /run/user/1000/smb-share:server=whatever,share=theshare/path and I think it's choking on the : which. mmmmmmmmmmm.)
Like it works but it doesn't work. I can't even rule out whether this is a firefox-but-in-snap problem (because that also causes Really Cool Problems, like obliterating the "right" way to install extensions for gnome). Ourgh.
this reminds me of how dolphin's drag and drop suddenly doesn't work if I have an Okular (document reader) window overlapping it in desktop spacetime.
you can click the files, you can right click them, but you can't ever drag them, until the window is removed or closed. May not be limited to okular.
the answer is simple:
have you ever tried "filing a bug report"?
the first thing anyone "Tech" enough will ask you, is "did you make a bug report?" "you know you can file bugs", "oh just go to bugzilla.[program].org".
Projects are big, you are small.
first, the projects in a Linux desktop operating system where you will have struggles like these, are invariably The Big Ones - things like Firefox, or GNOME, or a GNOME program, or Plasma, or a KDE program, or if you're lucky, it's a system function like udev, or systemd, or the Linux kernel itself.
Bug tickets are B2B, not you-and-me.
second, the issue-tracking bug-taking forms are not intended for general feedback from non-technical people, even if they say they are.
These are internal-facing customer ticket tracker enterprise relation management software, that - for some reason, Free Software projects do not put an interface between Joe & Jane User, and the Development Function.
Which, well -- it's commendable, even good that they open the ticket counter, as this is a part of being a Free Culture-oriented, Open Source Society-minded Open Project, and that's not something I want taken away - but user bug submissions need to not drop the user smack in the middle of Briscoe Engineering, Hall F, where they have to find a shoulder to tap that doesn't look busy.
The Ubuntu and GNOME bug-detectors like Whoopsie, they are just automatic forms for the actual bug tracker. No interface. They want an e-mail, and submit your bug to the ticket system. The problem is, there's a lot of crashes on the millions of machines running Ubuntu, and heaving a ticket every time something happens is a godawful way of doing it.
Windows had an "error reporting" interface, where every crash would take a "minidump", pop up a "This program encountered a problem" window box, and give you the option to heave it over the fence to Microsoft.
On Microsoft's side? They have an analytical triage system designed to take hundreds of these bug reports a minute, and silo them into the correct category, discard them if they're already noted, give an interface to a Triage Engineer who steadily whittles away at the stack, and eventually an engineer will be able to pick or be sent a report, depending on how critical it is or the priority given to that issue.
GNOME and Ubuntu don't have that; they have Bugzilla, or Launchpad or something.
These bugtrackers have an "enterprise groupware" interface. They're inscrutable business-function shaped software like Bugzilla, Trac, Buganizer, Phabricator, or if you're lucky, a Github or Gitlab issue tracker.
And the engineers get the issues first. Every issue. They triage it themselves.
You did the research we should've done, right??
third, when you do file a bug, you had better get it right the first time.
You had better have made sure no duplicates exist - or, any bugs that even look like they might be similar, even if your problem is experientially different, or even entirely unrelated.
You had better go and mark it the right way. Do you know what component failed? Did you audit your system already to see which process contributed to your GUI popping that error box? Do you have logs? Oh god, did you take the logs?
Logfiles are not easy to approach, for any software, especially on Linux, I don't care that they've "made systemd do it now", or that "/var/log is simple if you know how it works" the user should not have to know how it works!!
And if you mess any of these up, your ticket will be discarded. Too many of these, and you might get banned from the bug tracker for "noise".
Your bug has been rejected: "Out of scope"
fourth, once you do successfully get a bug in - the right bug, with the right template forms filled out, and after having done 30 minutes to 2 hours of work to make the bug "look good enough" for the nerds running the ticket tracker - #wontfix.
at a minimum wage of $15, that's throwing away a solid $30. you could buy food with that time.
nope, sorry, that's intended that way or it's too much work to fix it, fuck you #wontfix die in a fire goodbye.
This is hazing, it is not development.
You're a user. Grandma on Facebook level user. You just had to pop a command terminal, cat this mumbo-jumbo into a file with systemd-journald to be allowed to submit a bug, and after committing three hours of your life into what amounts to a hazing ritual, they deemed your bug Not Important Enough for these developers' precious Free Time.
Oh, and I'm not even going to mention Mailing Lists. That is a whole entire other can of worms, a whole pile of garbage that is, sadly, related to this.
So if someone asks why "Free as in Free Mattress" Software is how it is, that's a good chunk of it.
How to make it better? Helpdesk it.
Give users a person to talk to - a designated issue counselor, whose job it is, in the software development ecosystem, is to write tickets for the engineering-level bug tracker, and communicate to the user about their issue's progress, and ask for further information when necessary.
One layer of abstraction between the "Facebook Meemaw" user and the "Long Beard Engineers" or the "High Caffeine Catgirls" on your project, goes a long way to getting shit done, and done fucking right.
(@styx-os will have a Helpdesk.)
