Applications and online accounts

#1

My system updated to 3.2.0 this morning. One of the things I had hoped for was that the gnome applications would be able to use setting from “Online Accounts” to add online files. Gnome-photos in particular should display photos from online services that are activated in the Online Accounts section of the system settings. However it does not do so. It offers to take you to the online accounts system setting, but that link does nothing.

Gnome-Documents should have the same functionality, however I am unable to get it to install. It shows up as installing, however after the install the software center simply offers to “Install” it again.

bill

#2

@wove
Something that would help us a lot to understand the problem would be this:

  1. Open the application called ‘Terminal’
  2. In this application run the command: eos-diagnostics
  3. The above command will create a file with the information of your system (example: eos-diagnostic-160614_111731_UTC + 0100.txt); Send us this file so we can analyze and see a possible solution
#3

Thanks for the response. I am not sure a diagnostic file would be helpful here. I assume this is something of an issue of the interactions of flatpaks and OStree, which is probably something of a permissions problem. Flatpaks that access offline content can generally display the content in realtime, but fail when it comes to saving content. Gnome-web and FeedReader exhibit this. Download files from Gnome-web appear to download fine, but just never show up in the download folder. FeedReader works very nicely for reading content while connected to the internet, however even though content is suppose to download for offline viewing, the content is just not availble offline.

My assumption is the content is acquired just fine into some temp file somewhere, but for whatever reason (permissions) the content is just moved to the folders where the applications expect it to reside.

bill

#4

Not all of the applications make use of the online accounts. The file manager should integrate with your Google account to show documents in your Google Drive. The Photos all will try and use your Flickr and Facebook accounts to sync or publish photos (though I haven’t tried that yet). And of course the Mail app will use your Google accounts for email, calendar and tasks

#5

Yes, you are correct there are applications in Endless that do use your online account settings. Gnome-Photos, Gnome-Documents, Gnome Calendar, and Gnome-Books which are all in the software center are also designed to work with the online account settings. Gnome-Photos in particular upon first opening offers a link (a dead link) to setup online accounts. I consider it not doing so to be a bug. I do not know if it is a application bug, a flatpak bug or an Endless OS bug, but I think it is a bug.

I think an iso of a new free operating system attracts people who have been using computers and probably Linux based OSes for some time. And most likely these users (me for instance) already have established work flows and favorite applications. I apologize if my trying to make Endless my own, sounds as if I am ignoring the hard work that everyone at Endless has done in creating what is really an excellent OS.

bill

#6