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Is it fully internationalized, including support for CJK input methods? i18n is an orthogonal service that the DE or any other program may call into. Is it fu

Is it fully internationalized, including support for CJK input methods? i18n is an orthogonal service that the DE or any other program may call into. Is it fully accessible to users with disabilities, e.g. blind people and people with mobility impairments? Screen readers and screen magnifiers are orthogonal services that the DE may make accommodations for, though some DEs may be lesser fit for users with disabilities in general. Does it auto-mount USB thumb drives? This isn't even the job of the desktop environment, it's the job of a dedicated device node manager, which the DE may call into. It's completely orthogonal and can be accomplished even without so much as a display server, because it's a different layer.

digi_owl 11y ago
Not sure if device node managers are the right place either, as not every mount is related to a local device. NFS in the classic cross-network *nix mount. And depending on available software (FUSE and related) you can mount the likes of SMB/CIFS shares, FTP servers, even SSH/FISH can be used via a mount.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  NFS grossly violates POSIX file system semantics, so it's better to use something like 9P/Styx, instead. Unix systems really aren't good at abstracting local and remote mounts and binds into a singular resource, but the parent poster's scenario was implied to be a local user hotplug, which is what device managers largely do (if even that, udev these days just maintains the /dev/disk/* symlinks and handles query requests for the hardware database).
  - pjc50 11y ago
    it's better to use something like 9P/Styx, instead Who does this, though? Are there reliable adoption numbers? NFS semantics are wrong in well-known, familiar ways and it ships everywhere, making it still quite popular.
    - riskable 11y ago
      The real problem with NFS is that NFSv3 is easy to implement but insecure and has scalability issues (e.g. users can be in no more than 16 secondary groups) while NFSv4 is complicated and requires a complete Kerberos infrastructure (which is more complicated than rocket science!) to utilize in a way that works around the limitations of NFSv3. There's much better network file systems but because of many factors (boat/complexity being the biggest) their adoption is minimal. Once you move beyond single-user/simple read/write permissions there's really no easy to avoid complexity. It's just the nature of the beast that is sharing files over the network in a way that appears native to the user.

digi_owl 11y ago

Not sure if device node managers are the right place either, as not every mount is related to a local device. NFS in the classic cross-network *nix mount. And depending on available software (FUSE and related) you can mount the likes of SMB/CIFS shares, FTP servers, even SSH/FISH can be used via a mount.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
NFS grossly violates POSIX file system semantics, so it's better to use something like 9P/Styx, instead. Unix systems really aren't good at abstracting local and remote mounts and binds into a singular resource, but the parent poster's scenario was implied to be a local user hotplug, which is what device managers largely do (if even that, udev these days just maintains the /dev/disk/* symlinks and handles query requests for the hardware database).
- pjc50 11y ago
  it's better to use something like 9P/Styx, instead Who does this, though? Are there reliable adoption numbers? NFS semantics are wrong in well-known, familiar ways and it ships everywhere, making it still quite popular.
  - riskable 11y ago
    The real problem with NFS is that NFSv3 is easy to implement but insecure and has scalability issues (e.g. users can be in no more than 16 secondary groups) while NFSv4 is complicated and requires a complete Kerberos infrastructure (which is more complicated than rocket science!) to utilize in a way that works around the limitations of NFSv3. There's much better network file systems but because of many factors (boat/complexity being the biggest) their adoption is minimal. Once you move beyond single-user/simple read/write permissions there's really no easy to avoid complexity. It's just the nature of the beast that is sharing files over the network in a way that appears native to the user.