Unresponsive desktop on network loss?

This is not specifically a Fedora issue, but why does linux in general not handle loss of network connections gracefully? Especially if there are network mounts involved.

I have a laptop that I may move between different networks, putting it in to suspend and then opening up on a different network. If there were mount points on the previous network it can cause the entire machine to become unresponsive. The file manager becomes useless and unresponsive and using the terminal to try to unmount the non existant endpoint also causes the terminal to become non responsive. I have had to resort to forcefully powering down the machine as even a reboot would not complete, I presume waiting for a many hour timeout.

Without trying to compare to other operating systems, this is just not an issue in Windows, which will just give an error and continue to work allowing other file operations.

I have been using linux for many years and it’s the one thing that always been an issue, whether Fedora, Ubuntu or other distros, it also does not seem related to the desktop environment used or file manager as the issue occurs even in the terminal.

There are the various automount options that seem to allow a short timeout and unmount when not in use but this does not resolve the issue of the filesystem appearing to hang when an expected network mount is not available.

Perhaps I am missing some really obvious setting that fixes this issue, any thoughts are appreciated.

Global responsiveness issues tend to happen when using kernel space file system drivers.

User space drivers such as GVfs help isolate the impact on responsiveness to specific applications interacting with the filesystem and should be about the same level as in Windows.

Other similar issues can be related to sub-optimally configured NSS:
DNF and Firefox take extreemly long to start when VPN active on f40? - #4 by vgaetera

I’m not sure what to suggest from file explorer GUIs or mounted network shares.

For my home NAS, I have it accessible over FTP (vsftpd), and use FileZilla on Windows and Linux to transfer files to/from it. Network disconnects are handled fine through it, but it’s self-contained and isn’t presenting files to other apps or the rest of the OS.

I know Explorer on Windows was really odd about trying to access files over FTP on LAN (slow and/or wanting to open stuff in a browser) and that’s what made me not bother with mounting network drives.