I appreciate all your effort. Nevertheless I would like to add my thoughts about this issue. After my update to Breezy (from Warty) and after my first USB stick data losses I couldn't understand why this step backward (regarding usability) was done. >From the bugreports about this issue I understand that there was and are >reasons to do that.
But in my opinion everything else than complete transparency to the user isn't a real solution to this bug for a distro which claims to be user friendly. The point is: I put a USB stick, I copy some files, I see a progress dialog which goes to 100% and the disappears. At this point I assume that the files are copied and that they are there if I remove the stick. No matter how it's done, every additional task to do in order to really get the data on the stick is not acceptable in my eyes, in long term it will fail like all non-tranparent mount/unmount concept failed when it came to end user friendlyness. This was about the user level. On the technical level it's just the question about sync and async, as far as I understand. Personally, I would prefer the sync drawbacks, even if it's factor 10 slower (and I remember that in Warty I wondered about the slow speed) and reduces my sticks life time. I don't know what other end users think about this (I think we also shouldn't forget that maybe the users discussing here are technically at a higher level than the avg user), but since there exists a sort of "default PC operating system", we maybe should look at how it works there. Somebody wrote about the "remove safely icon" that appears in the Windows taskbar when you put in an USB stick. That's true. But I can assure you that it's not necessary to use it, and I think most users aren't using it. I never had data loss with Windows when just putting off the stick after the copy progress GUI dialog disappeared. My suggestion would be to make sync the default again and add the async-option as option in the graphical config tool. Linux desktop systems have suffered so much for so many years about non transparent mount/unmount operation, please don't reintroduce it, if it's not absolutely necessary (which in my opinion is not the case here). My time has more value than my USB sticks life time. -- unmounting of removable drives should show a progress dialog https://launchpad.net/bugs/32643 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
