I have listed all issues related to sharing in one topic, to have better view of the entire situation.
Some are bug reports and some are suggestions for improvement. I think we need to discuss them in one place.
At the moment, in the daily CD image of Bionic, the Sharing entry in Settings is pointless.
There’s no option to share something.
In Artful (I know we are talking about Bionic here) there is an option to enable File Sharing.
You flip the switch and it shows that sharing the Public directory is enabled.
But it is not working.
I looked in the logs and found out that apache2 and libapache2-mod-dnssd were missing.
Enabling the service from Settings did not trigger the installation of the required packages.
For WebDAV and DLNA which are already integrated in Sharing, I can see 2 options:
- The packages are present in the installation media. Enabling them from Sharing just starts the servers.
- The packages are not installed by default. Enabling them from Sharing downloads the missing packages and starts the server.
My opinion is to go with option 1.
Local network sharing should not require Internet access first to download the dependencies.
Again, this is just my opinion.
To have a great out of the box experience (it’s 2018) the GNOME Videos and Rhythmbox plugins for DLNA should be enabled by default or at least should be featured prominently to make users aware of their existence.
I don’t think that there are many users who know that they can easily watch videos and listen to music located on the local network using the default applications: GNOME Videos and Rhythmbox.
These are all very easy to fix and would make Ubuntu better.
Regarding SMB
I think it should be kept optional, with the packages not installed by default.
I also think that if Samba is not installed, it should be removed from Nautilus folder properties and from the right click menu.
So it should show up only after samba is installed.
Eventually, it could be integrated in Sharing and removed entirely from Nautilus.
Not all Ubuntu users are Linux sysadmins like we are and here’s what’s going to happen:
Because Samba is located in a place where a non technical user would look fist (right click menu) most non-technical users will enable File Sharing from there and they will install SMB (which does not work properly) instead of WebDAV.
They will end up with a half broken File Sharing.
They probably won’t look in Sharing, but if they do, they will think “File sharing works even if in Sharing it says it is not enabled”.
There is no clear distinction between sharing from Nautilus right click menu or folder properties (SMB) and sharing from Settings > Sharing (WebDAV). They even have the same name (Sharing) with no mention of the protocol being used.
Some users would probably just want to share their Public folder which is used by WebDAV but they will do it from the right click menu and will share it with SMB. After that, they could also enable WebDAV from Sharing.
We should have only one default way of sharing files otherwise it’s confusing.