ian

Oh thats what that was. It looked like an error message. So I tried it. Horrible UX, and it did not have samba. I tried a few of the alternatives and it didn't manage to connect.

1. It doesn't have to be zero effort. But it's good to have commands available for non IT specialists too. Where they don't have to learn IT or memorise complex commands or use an unfamiliar type of UI. Usability.

2. My kids need to learn about backups. Backups should be easy. They are easy on Windows or Android. It could be easy on Plasma too.

Script them? That sound like a lot of IT skills are needed for that. I've never seen or used a script. Nor have my kids. Telling non IT users to do that is going to scare people back to Windows.

3. You might be into IT tools, and not in to usability. But this is a usability issue. If I can find a GUI way that you haven't heard about because you are not interested in the GUI, then that is a benefit to Plasma non IT users, as I can share it around. Telling Plasma users to use another OS because Plasma can't do it is quite bad. Especially if it turns out Plasma 'can' do it.

I'm not 'scared of the cli'. I'm scared of wasting my time. I'm scared other people being told to use inappropriate tools and end up dropping Linux thinking it's a nerds OS. I'm prepared to put effort in, to try out lots of methods to find appropriate solutions. And share the results.

The terminal is obscure in itself. I'm not sure how to start it or what commands to use.

I just meant that, as a Plasma user, there is a missing function. And backing up is quite important too.

For what I use Linux for, Inkscape, Blender, web browser etc. do you think they send text commands from the GUI to another UI, the CLI? Sounds like an inefficient, legacy irrelevance to the user.

Remember this a usability issue, so for non IT users, incoherent text strings or commands are indeed magic spells. Any inappropriate UI is bad usability. They have put a lot of effort into usability on Plasma. So it's quite a shame that they got this so wrong.

Yes I tried the RcloneBrowser. But there is no way to create a new Sync in the GUI. Only manage already configured ones. Unless it's well hidden.

Thanks. Yes Gnome is better for apps accessing the LAN. And Deja Dup does connect as I'd expect. But it creates special files that can't be accessed on the LAN itself. Only via restore, that cant be used by other PCs or if you change your distro. So yes there is almost a way with Plasma. But if that is totally useless, it's still a fail.

There is always some process mounting the shares, be it graphical or not, even on windows

OK. Thanks. I thought the fstab entry looked a lot less involved, process wise.

Ah, yes, then you can try freefilesync, it supports a bunch of clouds and ftp, smb, etc There is also rclone

Freefile sync Files mode, can't navigate to the LAN and Cloud mode only has SFTP, FTP and Google Drive. I tried anyway and it did not like it. Maybe there is a trick.

Rclone command line tool has a web GUI mode. I'll try that next. Edit: No go. It seems the command line is needed to launch the rclone Web interface.

Typing magic spells is not something I want to explain to my kids. Bad usability is bad usability, even if they have to do it just once. Also it's not always worked for me. Maybe I got just 1 letter wrong? That is the weakness with a hack. Some time ago I did autostart smb4k. But after a while it no longer mounted any shares. Also I suspect running an app just to mount the share seems like an iffy workaround. Does everyone do it? And no I don't really want to mount the share at all. Yes I can already access it via Dolphin easily. But then I'd have to manually copy any new files and navigate to folders every time. More poor usability compared to 1 click in a sync app. I think Plasma is better than this.

Thanks. I'm sure that is technically possible. However I'm looking for an easy GUI way to do this for non IT specialists. Plasma fails badly here. Unless I'm missing a trick...

Thanks but no. It's an off the shelf NAS disk (WD My-Cloud 4TB) with setup access via a web page. Technically it might be possible, requiring an IT hack. But I'm looking for a user-centric way.

Duplicati Thanks. I just tried it. It doesn't list Samba under storage type. I tried it anyway and never managed to get it to work. It's really designed for cloud services. It might be possible to make it work if I knew networking trickery. But I can't do it.