Sunflower file manager

[asqwerth]

Nothing special. When my old XP PC began to fall apart end of 2014, I bought a Synology NAS as a secondary backup over and above my external drive backup. Connected it to my network, so the family could upload media, family photos etc and stream it to their mobile devices.

Got my current PC early 2015 and the NAS is accessible via browser and it's still a secondary backup (only of selected parts of the shared Data partition, which is why I would like new sunflower FM to work just as gtk2 sunflower does). I backup the whole Data partition on my ext drive.

I'm not so concerned about my various distro installs (15!). If one dies I have so many more to use until I have time to restore a backup. I don't bother with timeshift or anything. Once in a few months I simply use gparted to copy a whole distro partition to a separate many-partitioned USB external drive that contains only distro partition backups. I let it run while I'm using my computer on whatever other distro I'm booted into.

And for things like MX I copy-backup very infrequently since they are bombproof. An old gparted copy can easily do as a restoration copy because subsequent updates are relatively small. I'm more regular for rolling stuff like Manjaro or arch-based since their updates accumulate fast. To be frank, I can count the number of times I've had to to restore any distro from those backups on 1 hand.

[ADDED: due to the distros being borked, that is. I've used the gparted copies many times to move distros to different/new partitions as I rearrange the drive containing my distros. Maybe I find a partition too small for a distro and I can't resize that partition because it's in between other distros, etc].

Kernel changes after a restoration don't affect my grub entries because I use custom grub entries for all my distros that point towards the grub.cfg of each distro. And the distros are identified by partition labels, not sdX reference numbers.

[hebelwirkung]

If having the dual pane function is the main thing, you could use pcManFM. It does have that, plus it's fast and of all the file managers I've used, it has the lowest RAM usage. For simple tasks like extracting archives, moving files and so on, it's excellent. And installing it doesn't pull in any other stuff you don't want.

[asqwerth]

No, it's the "compare file directories" function that helps me select new items to copy new stuff from my data partition to my NAS manually.

It somehow seems to work better for my use case than double commander's similar function. The latter seems to see many same name items as still different (eg the same wallpaper file with same name!) so I get more things highlighted as different and new than should be the case.

But with gtk3 sunflower I can't even mount Nas into a pane, even if premounted in thunar.

I'm keeping my mx18 and mx19 installs as long as I can so I can continue to use gtk2 sunflower, even after 21 is out.

[OKie]

No, it's the "compare file directories" function that helps me select new items to copy new stuff from my data partition to my NAS manually.
...SNIP....

I've been doing a survey of file managers. I like Sunflower because of the clean look and simplicity. It's actually much more relaxed to use than, like SpaceFM, which is the most stressful, but also fun. I think the clean look of Sunflower is the main selling point.

I also did a survey of merging tools, but I didn't look at mounting remote drives. When you mount this NAS, what protocol are you using? Meld doesn't appear to have that functionality. Kompare has some ability to mount drives, but probably not what you're looking for. FreeFileSync is a nice package and allows mounting remote drives. Any good for you?

What about making a special launcher to mount the drive then run Sunflower?

[OKie]

Does anyone know how to get sunflower to bring up devices?
I hate to navigate the file system just to get to my usb devices.

[Stevo]

No, it's the "compare file directories" function that helps me select new items to copy new stuff from my data partition to my NAS manually.
...SNIP....

I've been doing a survey of file managers. I like Sunflower because of the clean look and simplicity. It's actually much more relaxed to use than, like SpaceFM, which is the most stressful, but also fun. I think the clean look of Sunflower is the main selling point.

I also did a survey of merging tools, but I didn't look at mounting remote drives. When you mount this NAS, what protocol are you using? Meld doesn't appear to have that functionality. Kompare has some ability to mount drives, but probably not what you're looking for. FreeFileSync is a nice package and allows mounting remote drives. Any good for you?

What about making a special launcher to mount the drive then run Sunflower?

We have the current Free File Sync packaged and in the MX 21 repo, but it needs gcc-10 to build, and we don't have that backported for MX 19--lack of time again. You can probably run the prebuilt binary built by the developers, though.