Is MTP just a ferocious pile of dung?

asked 2016-10-05 11:55:46 +0200

Dankoozy
481 ●14 ●20 ●28

I spent over an hour trying to transfer a couple of songs to my Aqua Fish. The normal way I use is sftp/filezilla over Wifi, but had no coverage here. SD card was a no-go because my card reader doesn't like 64GB cards (surprisingly the Fish does even though it claims to only go to 32GB). In the end I set up hostapd on the machine I was using and was able to transfer over Wifi.

But MTP is just a pure pig, on Xubuntu at least. It transferred some small jpg's very slowly but balked at any FLAC file, disconnected, stalled, was unresponsive, crashed the filemanager using it, lost the device and was unable to get it back without rebooting. Pretty much how MTP has always behaved on any platform I ever used it on. It was always very prone to this. Is there something inherently wrong with the protocol, is it overcomplicated or badly designed?

I have a Canon 1300D as well that uses MTP and it hasn't given that much trouble yet but its still much more finnicky than USB mass storage. I'm sure the fact that it's a Microsoft-designed protocol doesn't help, that company has a knack for helping out their paying partners with implementing it in such a way that it works while leaving the open source crowd in the lurch