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I've lost patience with such products, and instead I tradeoff fewer features for more control. This applies to hardware too.
I suppose I’ve just become used to saying no to a bunch of things when installing Dropbox, but once that’s done I have no interactions with it at all. I don’t remember being pestered at any point recently and I’ve got it on three devices. I keep waiting for it to annoy me in some way that causes me to find another solution but it’s yet to happen. I migrated several G Suite accounts to Fastmail recently so I suspect i…
Personally I've noticed how dropbox has gone from being a tool that fits well into a larger context, to instead trying to encompass the entire experience of touching synced files. For example, the number of clicks (and the precision of those clicks and the distractions around them) to open the dropbox folder in your OS's file explorer has gradually increased. And the amount of attention dropbox asks for, things like…
Obviously the moment it stops just sitting there backing up my files and keeping them in sync across my devices I’d be bothered, but whatever they’re trying to force on people hasn’t really registered with me in a decade of use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same could happen with Dropbox/icloud, or even if you just ran two Minecraft instances with the same copy of the world on one machine - Minecraft worlds are not designed for concurrent modification by multiple processes
The same can't happen with Dropbox, because minecraft worlds are NOT stored in ~/Dropbox/ folder. That actually reinforces my point about a separate synced folder being a plus for most users, not a minus.
I tried many sync solutions (Syncthing, SparkleShare, Resilio, Mega, Seafile, NextCloud) and I almost always experienced some kind of data corruption. Syncthing was no exception. I could not reproduce the problem, so I never made a bug report. The corruption was something like this: - I recursively renamed all files from a folder from uppercase to lower case. Suddenly I duplicated files, uppercase and lower case. - I…
With iCloud and Dropbox (and SaaS in general), everything is linked to your user account. They assume that each computer is used by exactly one user.
But that just doesn't match my reality! At home we have a shared computer in the living room, and at work we have build servers shared by multiple people.
I really don't want to sign in with my personal Apple ID or Dropbox account on a shared computer.
With Syncthing that doesn't matter. I can just sync a single folder, and syncthing doesn't care who that folder belongs to and doesn't require granting access to unrelated folders that happen to belong to the same user.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same could happen with Dropbox/icloud, or even if you just ran two Minecraft instances with the same copy of the world on one machine - Minecraft worlds are not designed for concurrent modification by multiple processes
The same can't happen with Dropbox, because minecraft worlds are NOT stored in ~/Dropbox/ folder. That actually reinforces my point about a separate synced folder being a plus for most users, not a minus.
They certainly can be. They can be stored wherever you like, either if you are using a modding/hacking launcher (both are very popular for non-technical players, e.g. kids who aren't programmers) or if you are running a minecraft server (the vanilla server jar runs wherever you decide to put it, and doing this is not exactly an esoteric feat; again, nontechnical kids do it.)
All good and well, but isn't comparing Syncthing and Dropbox kind of apples to oranges? Dropbox has a completely different scope that goes beyond what Syncthing is offering. If you don't require the features Dropbox offers, it's the wrong tool in the first place.
Both are solutions to sync a folder across multiple devices. The fact that dropbox added a bunch of extra features over the years is irrelevant to most users.
If all you want to do is syncing folders across devices, use a tool that does just that. Just to emphasize how this is relevant, here's what Dropbox says about what it is [0].
> What is Dropbox?
> Dropbox is a place where all your team’s content comes together.
There's nothing in that very first sentence of their own description of the product that suggests syncing folders across devices as a use case.
Just because you can do that, too, doesn't mean it's the primary use case. Dropbox sees their product as a solution for collaborating across teams.
But that's only one side, so let's look at the "Personal Use"-section [1]:
> Back up your big ideas, your best memories and your family traditions.
And again, syncing folders across devices isn't mentioned - they see Dropbox as a centralised backup solution.
> Centralise your storage, declutter your life
So they tell the user exactly how they see their product and the laborious installation process is a consequence of that.
So while you see a product for syncing across devices, the product is advertised as a collaboration solution or a centralised storage for backup and device-independent global access.
That's not me claiming this either, this is straight from the horse's mouth and what users are told.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t that happen with Dropbox too? Maybe the race condition just happens less often because it syncs slower?
No, because you'll have to do quite a few steps to put an actively used minecraft world in a ~/Dropbox/ folder.