Per Bug #303474, "Recent folders" that can't be found are temporarily hidden now. For the usecase given in the original report, this is a great improvement. However, now the dozens of (temporary) folders are invisibly tracked, checked on every startup and can't even be removed from the list anymore except the user decides to "forget all". Also, there are use cases, where the user wants some folders to be listed even though they are currently not reachable, for example because there is currently no network connection. There are even use cases, where the former behaviour is wanted: ask for credentials in order to reconnect to the folder. Reproducible: Always Expected Results: So now there needs to be a more sophisticated management of recent folders. Certainly a context menu action "forget unreachable folders" would be necessary. A context menu switch "display hidden folders: yes/no", would be great, too. A nice alternative to that could be showing unreachable folders collapsed at the bottom instead of completely hidden. Also, the original behaviour should be available as a Preferences switch.
Gwenview only hides non-existing folders if they are "fast local urls": folders which are from the hard-drive (an url pointing to a folder on a NFS mount for example is considered as a "slow local url"). This means remote folders should still appear even if network is down.