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.
there's two things here colliding:
- no one has free time anymore, not really. not to spend doing grueling work. I get it. (this includes users. no one has that surplus free time/labor anymore. Programmers, statistically, tend to have more than most.)
- But that means
- you need to be honest with the users about your level of ability to do things, and just how little support they'll get. For random utilities this is excusable, but when specifically Gnome and KDE try to present well-tailored, professional fronts? You're doing that sort of 'lying about spare-capacity:complexity ratios' without realizing.
and these two forces are constantly fighting each other.
along with most users being completely alienated by software labor, because to them it's hard, but that's from inexperience, so surely it must be easier for the learned priests. But no, it doesn't get easier. you just get faster.
and most project programmers being completely alienated from the universe of non-poweruser users.
And that's the huge gulf that's fueled many an OSS/FS culture war.
appoint - or hell, hire - one agent whose job it is, as a person, to read e-mails and turn them into Well-Formed Fully-Qualified Bug Reports, and need to do next to nothing else on the software platform. they can be a developer or engineer, but that's only because the skillset needed to understand both people and understand code or software systems, is necessary.
I'd gladly be that person, and I'm sure there's others out there.
but on the flip side, kicking people to User Forums is also very bad.
Everyone on an Arch or Gentoo or Ubuntu or Debian or any other FOSS forum is at war with you. You are presumed guilty, before your message proves you innocent. You will be moderated away for "duplicate threads". You will be banned for "not doing the chicken dance the right way" to join.
The same hazing rituals you see in the bug trackers, happens on the Forums - except it is now worse, because these aren't Engineers or Developers telling you off on technicalities - these are Forum Admins, Moderators, or worse, wannabe tinpot-dictator "Super Poster!"s who nolife the forums and scatter noobs before they can even say "hello?"
So even being genuine about "We aren't support, please goto Community" is a bad move, because now the Community is chewing you up and spitting you out all the same.
And nobody on community forums is taking your submitted problem/helpthread and turning it into a Well-Formed Fully-Qualified Bug Report.
(except me, sometimes. Sometimes I'm that nobody.)