Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive

abevoelker.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 227 posts

Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive

#2

Post by noasaservice »

Those were the quaint times when we still believed that Google was awesome and cool, and doing amazing things.

Now, it's a "our project is already dead", automated banning hellscape, where the only assistance is from other yet-to-be-AI-killed fellow user attempt to barely help. Or gods forbid, find someone here for a "social media escalation".

I used to care. I gave up caring WRT google ages ago. They are not worth the trouble.

Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive

#4

Post by throwaway787544 »

Worth noting that it's not actually "Google" that said to "hang tight". An entire brand does not make a decision like whether to support Linux. It's a two-pizza team with a shitty budget and a remit to just keep the damn thing from going down and working out all the bugs with basic features like moving a file to a new folder in a weird drop-down.

I'm sure the team would like to support Linux, if they had a bigger budget, if they could get out from all of their tech debt, if they had one or two specialized engineers added to their team. But the giant corporate behemoth isn't even remotely aware of those problems, nor will it care. There would have to be a clear case that adding a Linux client would create real business value. But considering how small Linux users probably are, and without an additional revenue stream to offset the cost of development, it's a non-starter.

Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive

#5

Post by dang »

Related

How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24183399 - Aug 2020 (109 comments)

How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434643 - April 2015 (59 comments)

Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive

#6

Post by anonymoushn »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #4

Worth noting that it's not actually "Google" that said to "hang tight". An entire brand does not make a decision like whether to support Linux. It's a two-pizza team with a shitty budget and a remit to just keep the damn thing from going down and working out all the bugs with basic features like moving a file to a new folder in a weird drop-down. I'm sure the team would like to support Linux, if they had a bigger bud…

Maybe they could ship a linux app instead of deprecating and replacing the mac app next time :)

Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive

#8

Post by cloudking »

The market size is not big enough to justify the internal costs of building and maintaining it.

For dev environments, you can workaround it using Windows + Drive filestream + WSL. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2999#issuecomment-91...

Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive

#9

Post by jchw »

Times have changed in many more ways than one.

These days I greatly prefer to own my data more directly, which I accomplish using a NAS. I don’t use Dropbox OR Google Drive, I use Syncthing, which can do stuff that neither of those could ever dream of in terms of syncing between machines.

Not only do I not want Google Drive, I don’t even want anything like it.

That said, I totally get why it’s still important. I do use Google Drive at work and for that type of use case I would not argue in favor of self-hosting. Syncthing is great for a single person or even a fairly large group of people, but not for a big organization. Not to mention you probably use Google Docs or Office 365 anyways, both of which are integrated with their respective company’s storage offerings. Syncthing won’t give you directory sync, docs integration, or granular ACLs.

But that’s actually perfectly fine, because I don’t need any of those things. Hell, I flat out don’t really want them. You could probably get something similar with ownCloud which I did try running, and I’m not even particularly enticed. I’m sure Synology has a full suite as well, but it’s not what I want out of my NAS. Part of being happier with my technology was just as much realizing what I didn’t want as it was realizing what I wanted.

Post reply on HN