I’ve had my share of issues with network shares on any operating system, but since I mostly use KDE these days I found this deep dive into how, exactly, network shares work in KDE quite interesting. It turns out that while network shares in KDE’s Dolphin mostly work, it does involves a few layers that sometimes don’t interact well with each other, leading to really curious and annoying problems with mounted shares not appearing, permission issues, and so on.
The biggest cause of problems is when using a non-KDE application in KDE that also happens to use a non-KDE save/open dialog. Such a non-KDE save/open dialog won’t be able to see any network shared mounted by KDE, and sadly, quite a few applications you’re likely to use on a KDE installation use non-KDE open/save dialogs, like Blender, GIMP, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Inkscape, Audacity, DaVinci Resolve, and more. That’s one hell of a list of applications to offer inconsistent or outright broken access to network shares you’ve set up and mounted in KDE.
Luckily, this issue seems to be getting a ton of attention soon.
All is not lost. Happily, KDE just received an investment of over €1.2 million from the Sovereign Tech Fund, and it includes funding for improvements to KDE’s network share handling!
↫ Nate Graham
The project is in the planning phases at the moment, but they’re considering a whole slew of possible changes, fixes, and workarounds to make this stupid and annoying problem just go away. In 2026, nobody should be dealing with manually editing /etc/fstab or getting frustrated over supposedly disappearing network shares.
Ir came up in the recent linus tech tips Linux challenge and I thought someone might take up the challenge put down
This is exactly why I hate desktop environments / gnome / KDE and whatsoever. Unix should be run the Unix way. Use X11 and a minimalist window manager. I do not see what is overly complicated mounting network shares like
‘sudo mount -t nfs,cifs,… yourservername:/your share yourmountpoint’
works everywhere. No desktop environments that turn your Unix into windows with exactly the same flaws. Making it so much more ‘userfriendly’ that nothing works.
There can be a middle term, right?
IRIX has a lot of user friendly next-next-finish wizards for complicated operations, including mounting network shares. HP-UX, too. Heck, as much as SMIT is a bizarre thing, if you try to configure a network share using the GUI/TUI, before you hit finish, you get to see the command it is actually going to run.
I’ve been using KDE quite a bit now and I don’t like some of the locking operations. When I resume from sleep, Dolphin is pretty much dead before the Wi-Fi interface comes back up and, even then, if it takes a while for the connection to restore, then I can’t even browse local folders. Sometimes I can start a new Dolphin window, but sometimes the whole interface freezes. And we are speaking of a machine with fast nvmes and 64GB of RAM.
What I don’t like is that when we make things too easy all the time, they also must be flawless, and they never are. Cars used to be worse, and everyone knew how to change a blown fuse. You knew you couldn’t just slam the brakes like an idiot or floor the gas while turning. Tyres were also worse so I think overall people respected the machine more.
Now everything works like “magic” and when it doesn’t, people go mad. If it is supposed to be “magic”, then it MUST be flawless, and we will never get there.
When I was still in big corp, at age 35, my colleagues at age 25 had issues to figure out how to install a shared printer (even though IT tried to make the process as easy as possible), and they couldn’t grasp the concept of not being able to just magically install and run anything on their computers. Calls to support because “you are not authorized” – well, you are not supposed to!
My nonagenarian grandfather navigates GNOME, Mac and Windows with equal partial ease – my 18 years old cousin loses his mind if he clicks “play” on steam and something goes wrong – he has no idea where to start from, what to look for or even how to google for the answer to the problem.
This is a really great comment. Hiding the guts for polish makes one expect perfection, and probably all sorts of other things.
I hate this philosophy.
The Unix way was created for computers where software only had access to 64kb of address space, and were operated by people specifically trained in operating computers.
IT was birthed in a technology landscape that has absolutely no resemblance to the modern landscape.
I understand that you hate that philosophy, but what is the alternative. Piles of software to get things done, that anyways could be done before. Take sound. In the old days we had OSS. We decided that OSS is not good enough, though we built ALSA that could do quasi everything. From mixing to, to pipeping sound to uncountable of speakers on uncountable of sound cards. But some guys came around and told us well it is all too complicated and now we have on top pipewire, pulseaudio and what not. The result, a staggering number of people who complain that their audio does not work. What a great progress in the name of usability. I wounder what staggering number we have now thanks to KDE breaking the system that was easy “mounting a network drive” and solved since for ever, into a complicated thing that not even rocket scientists understand, requiring a special fuse filesystem and what not, just to make mounting more userfriendly than “sudo mount -t nfs server:/networkshare /mountpoint”. I mean this is total craze looking at it from above. Now it probably failes for 80% because the solution to replace the above command, well it was thought through so that “idiots can use computers”. Software developers that develop software so that “idiots can use computers” should be banned from this planet. I do not know how much kind of havoc and enshittification they have already caused. What is so damn wrong with the idea to learn your tools before you use them?
Same could go for X11 vs the overglorified and so much easier Wayland which still seems to break everywhere…,
OpenRC vs SystemD which well also seem to have caused more problems than solutions… etc… etc.. etc..
I agree with you.
The problem is a developer or a group thinking they have the magic solution for a real problem. Computers are complex machines controlled by complex software. The complexity MUST and WILL INEVITABLY live somewhere.
The old unix way is nice because you get to combine simple tools to achieve complex outcomes, and it is easy to track where something may be going wrong.
Now we may expose all the complexity to the user and we are back to DOS (which people could and did use at home). I will forever remember that I should rather do “lh mouse” instead of “mouse” to free up memory for whatever I want to do and I figured that out as a child without Internet. My father had to log into AS/400 via dial up to log his sales, and he did that for 15+ years. The interface was stable and he could enter data very fast.
Or we may hide all the complexity away from the user, which is what KDE tries to do. Fine, but that only works perfectly well under lab conditions. And it is crazy. They allow me to expose different bluetooth codecs for my external DAC and depending on the codec I choose, my microphone disappears. How’s the end user supposed to know that? At some point, my microphone disappeared because of that and it took me some time digging into forums that, hey, whatever… right? It’s the magic that failed.
Or… why can’t I close a dolphin window if my wifi is down? ………………….
My issue with this UNIX philosophy is that people act like it is the only philosophy in software development, and everthing that doesn’t follow it is wrong.
Ah. There we go. That’s the elitist take that makes Linux users so absolutely insufferable. >80% of the users in my org have post-graduate degrees, and are very knowledgeable in their respective fields. They absolutely aren’t idiots, but technology use is imposed on them. Knowing how to edit /etc/fstab or manually mount a network share wouldn’t make them better at their job.
And as somebody that absolutely knows how to mount network shares manually, I am looking forward to this just for the convenience.
It is not a question about Linux or Unix alone. It is a question about do you want to learn your tool before you use it or not. How long would it need your ‘knowledgeable’ workforce to understand and type ‘mount -t cifs servername:/folder /mountpoint’. Against how long would it take them to understand anything that is going on if KDE fails to mount that folder on that server at that mountpoint.
haschka,
I’m all for learning command line tools and I benefit so much from automating them. However I still can appreciate user-friendly GUI interfaces. GUIs are not only useful for making features more accessible, but they can also be productivity aids even for advanced users. IMHO we should not be against this so long as the programming interfaces are complimentary. Compare this to windows having “Map network drive” GUI and the “NET USE” command, which are non-exclusive and compliment each other.
The shortcoming of KDE’s network share implementation stems from them only working with KDE’s own userspace tools. As I understand the article, KDE are going to integrate properly with linux’s standard mounting process so that it works with all applications. IMHO, even as someone who uses “mount”, the GUI version of it can still improve operator workflow and should be welcomed.
What I am concerned about is getting a new GUI implementation that behaves exclusively to the to the CLI tools that we already have and punishes those who prefer CLI.. Some prominent devs like Lennart Poettering are guilty of producing software that steps on everyone else and cause great harm to alternatives. This has been a huge problem and every time this happens it is regressive for linux.
So I do think Drumhellar has a point, not everyone needs to use the CLI tools and we shouldn’t be forcing them to. I just hope KDE’s work is done in a way that brings thoughtful integration between CLI and GUI.
I’d rather not escalate to su just to mount a network drive, thankyouverymuch.
But it does. The issue is accessing the path, because the filesystem API can’t resolve URL.
I do edit /etc/fstab by hand, and i would be really frustrated to not be able to. What a weird 2026 you’re living in !
The way Discover File Manager mounts SMB shares gives crap performance. It’s “fine” and works but if your doing big files or lots of files you’d be better off mounting in with root in some fashion, either fstab, systemd system file, or sudo. One would think FUSE would have a decent Samba or NFS implementation at this point but nope.
Why would anyone like to use fuse, if you have an in kernel implementation of a filesystem, that is maintained since 20+ years ? If an in kernel filesystem exists, well than use the “in kernel filesystem” it will run circles, performance wise, around any fuse implementation.
Because Linux isn’t the only OS, and not every OS has kernel support for SMB/CIFS
Not every OS has support for fuse. In general those who have support for fuse have SMB/CIFS…
Totally different use cases
Server? Mount if in fstab..
My personal workstation, where my years of Linux experience makes editing fstab trivial? Yes.
Remote user, who may not have root access on their laptop? And not Linux experienced? This use case is very valid.
Windows and Mac users don’t need root.
I’m just saying gio and smbclient kind of suck. I’m surprised nothing better has come along. I just mentioned FUSE as a software that maybe should be doing that
I do not need to edit fstab to mount a cifs/smb filesystem. On my gentoo box I write “doas mount -t cifs servername:/share /mountpoint” – no need to edit any file.
The question is how hard is it to learn
“doas mount -t cifs servername:/share /mountpoint”
and how hard is it to learn all the tech that you need to know, and is mostly probably undocumented when mounting in something like a gnome virtual filesystem or like here in KDE fails ! This opaquness to the enduser because he should be to stupid to know, is exactly what makes people hate windows / android / ios / mac os and all the consumer oses..
Why would a user need root privs to mount a Windows file share?
Server yes. Workstation sure. A desktop user? That’s stupid for it to be required.
Quit gatekeeping. Yes your way is the correct way, but for desktop Linux there should be a non root way that’s not limited. MacOS figured it and there unix based.
I just use rclone config. Not native, but it seems to work fine regardless of your desktop environment. If you rebase, it still works.