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Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

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Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#201

Post by josteink »

IanSanders wrote: post #122
hunter2_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand slightly on the confusion, perhaps give a typical support question or similar?

My guess is people don't organise their folders well and then struggle to navigate and search properly. Which shouldn't mean the rest should get punished, but here we are.

Which effectively mean that a modern iPhone probably has 100x the computing power of a 10 year old laptop and a 100th of the utility, because it’s based on this limited philosophy.

What a waste.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#202

Post by hemancuso »

mad182 wrote: post #197
dreamcompiler wrote: post #17

Dropbox is two things: Cheap cloud file storage with an API, and a desktop app. The desktop app used to be a glorified FUSE app that worked well (except on ARM Linux for some reason) and got out of your way. Now Dropbox has decided it's time to ruin the desktop app in an effort to chase conversions. This strategy will fail. Fortunately their cloud storage backend still works (unless it bugs you that they just increas…

Expandrive has a really shit pricing/marketing. When I switched from Linux to Mac for a while some years ago, I felt the lack of easily mounting sftp as gnome does. So I found Expandrive did that very well. $39.95 seemed a bit steep for such a simple thing, but whatever, it was working great and I paid that. Few months later came out the next version and it turned out upgrades were not included, and now it's $49.95.…

We only email a couple times a year. And we definitely don’t silently update to a new major version. Ping support and link this thread and we can upgrade you free. Sorry for the trouble.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#203

Post by gumby »

Poor Dropbox (and poor Dropbox investors). Their core product is really just a feature, and now others offer that...where's the value?

With the recent price increase I've moved most of my DB stuff elsewhere and now can get by with the free plan, only for reading things others share with me.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#204

Post by cat199 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #184
speeder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What killed SBlaster was not motherboards having sound cards. It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies. It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition…

Wow you are messing up timelines and your projecting your experience/reason/hobbies on the market. DVD drives weren’t even a thing when people stopped buying soundcards. Yeah a small selection wanted 3d sound for a gaming edge, and that was available on low cost cards pretty soon. Before that they a place, but all features were available through software. The mixer, sampler, channels.

> DVD drives weren’t even a thing when people stopped buying soundcards.

pretty sure these happened at around the same time. Single data point:

my 486-era machine (92):

- bolt on sb16+cdrom as part of 'multimedia upgrade' (MPC II)

my pentium-I era machine (96):

- came with sb16+cdrom (MPC III)

my pentium-II era machine (98):

- came with integrated DVD-ROM + ac97 audio

none of these were particularly 'special' as far as 'what people were buying then'

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#205

Post by ukyrgf »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #53

I've been meaning to move off of Dropbox and Google drive, does anyone have any recommendations? I know there are some Torrent related syncs out there. I just want something that is not centralized and controlled by an entity. I want full control of it and I sync between desktop/laptop and Android

Resilio Sync is the torrent one you're thinking of and it is great. The killer feature for me is the IgnoreList file in the root of the shared folder, so you can tell it not to sync "node_modules" in your source code folder.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#206

Post by stirfrykitty »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #88
speeder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What killed SBlaster was not motherboards having sound cards. It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies. It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition…

I think it's safe to say CRTs were killed by their incredible bulk compared to LCD displays.

Back in the early 2000s, our company phased out the huge 21" Sun boat anchor monitors for another smaller unit also with a 21" screen. They were put on the loading dock and we were told they were up for grabs. A colleague and I took several and the following weekend we took them to his private land where we proceeded to ascertain which handgun and rifle calibers were best at destroying them up close and at a distance. Up close .45 ACP was the winner. At a distance .308 was the winner. We also learned that a 6.5x55 Swedish will completely pass through one and lodge itself into a tree so deep we could not retrieve the projectile. Contrary to popular belief, monitors (at least these) did not explode when struck. Interestingly enough, the 6.5x55 will also handily pass through a HDD with no worries. All standard FMJ rounds.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#207

Post by mrlala »

bluecalm wrote: post #156
mrlala wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break. OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff. We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reason…

I don't know. I had ten of thousands of files once and wanted to delete them. Dropbox client hangs and then gives an error. API doesn't work with that many files, web version doesn't work either. I ended up writing a script that uses API call for every separate file and it took like 3 days to delete them all. I really don't think they handle many files well after that experience and wouldn't trust them if I needed re…

We have over 1 million files in our dropbox and it's never been a problem..

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#208

Post by nosefrog »

josteink wrote: post #194
greenleafjacob wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Dropbox recently dropped support for certain Linux file systems like XFS, BTRFS, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17732912

And lost me as a customer for it. Effectively Dropbox is no longer the universal solution guaranteed to work everywhere, which was the reason I chose them before. They deliberately killed off their unique selling point. These days I run Nextcloud on iOS, Windows and Linux and it doesn't complain about ZFS.

For what it's worth, Dropbox recently added support for those file systems: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Desktop-client-builds/Beta-B...

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#209

Post by bassman9000 »

bhouston wrote: post #40
CPLX wrote: post #3

This seems like a good time to resurface the worlds best Quora answer, by Michael Wolfe. Answering “Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar functionality?”: Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do: There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync. They built that. Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea. "B…

> "But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!" > > No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs. This argument is a good one but it only covers the rise of Dropbox. We are now in a different era. Dropbox's functionality is now table stakes and not somet…

Windows and mac have sync too

Sync to where? To other Windows or macs? Limited usability. Dropbox was the first to offer true seamless sync at scale, across ALL common OS/devices.

Dropbox has a relevancy problem

That's like saying email is dead because FB can embed videos on posts. Like the Quora guy said, we don't want crap. Email will still be around 10y from now, and Dropbox has, at a minimum, another 5.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#210

Post by josteink »

nosefrog wrote: post #208
josteink wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And lost me as a customer for it. Effectively Dropbox is no longer the universal solution guaranteed to work everywhere, which was the reason I chose them before. They deliberately killed off their unique selling point. These days I run Nextcloud on iOS, Windows and Linux and it doesn't complain about ZFS.

For what it's worth, Dropbox recently added support for those file systems: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Desktop-client-builds/Beta-B...

Make that re-added after pointlessly, explicitly and intentionally breaking setups which people/customers relied on and which had been working flawlessly for years.

That lost them a shit-ton of goodwill. Too little, too late.

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