Live data from Hacker News

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

abevoelker.github.io

31–40 of 227 posts

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

#31
post #3

Link to the Google product forum on the target page is broken, so this is not informative at all.

Yeah, looks like they broke the groups page, which was 'migrated' from an original Plus page at https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadMcCullough/posts/SxDNKR7ehS...

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

#32
post #29

Just give us a web filesystem already. Stop with these shitty infantilized GUIs with no hierarchical organization and an overreliance on search to find things. I have literally hundreds of thousands to millions of files on my local machines and have no trouble remembering where I put things. Drive can't seem to scale past a few dozen before it's confusing, useless, and apparently lossy. Remember when web servers woul…

No post body was provided.

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

#33

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…

Though Linux might be a small platform it's the only one that really matters.

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

#34
post #29

Just give us a web filesystem already. Stop with these shitty infantilized GUIs with no hierarchical organization and an overreliance on search to find things. I have literally hundreds of thousands to millions of files on my local machines and have no trouble remembering where I put things. Drive can't seem to scale past a few dozen before it's confusing, useless, and apparently lossy. Remember when web servers woul…

Quoted post unavailable.

Because one would presume that a company building online file storage as a product would want it to work?

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

#35
As the decision seems to be deliberate, I'm interested why Google has chosen not to implement such a feature. I'm a paying GSuite customer. I'd love to be able to NFS-mount portions of my home directory into Google Drive for access across platforms and sharing/collaboration with others.

There's got to be a reason that Google Drive isn't interested in implementing linux mounts -- I'd be surprised if it is market share alone. The reason may be interesting/unexpected.

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

#36
post #16

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...

When I worked at Google, almost all developer workstations were running Linux. That alone really should be plenty of justification for having such a client. They did not.

Internally is a lot different than externally https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

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

#37
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Because one would presume that a company building online file storage as a product would want it to work?

No post body was provided.

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

#38
post #14

The web app works fine. In fact, it works better than anything OneDrive related for example (which never seems to sync properly). Chrome and all of Google's services make being in Linux-land way easier...

I suspect that there's a fundamental conflict in semantics somewhere between drive and posix filesystems. Any sort of filesystem wrapper on top of drive would immediately require making annoying compromises, and the trade-off is convenience vs. data safety.

Targeting a locked down OS like Windows or Mac isn't too difficult, because those compromises can be carefully implemented in a way that avoids accidental data corruption but doesn't negatively impact user workflow too much. On a Linux system, there's hundreds if not thousands of configurations that folk would expect a filesystem to work in, and so it's a lot more difficult to strike that balance.

Years ago, I remember a coworker dragged a directory around on his MacBook, and it completely flattened the company's entire drive directory structure.

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

#40
post #29

Just give us a web filesystem already. Stop with these shitty infantilized GUIs with no hierarchical organization and an overreliance on search to find things. I have literally hundreds of thousands to millions of files on my local machines and have no trouble remembering where I put things. Drive can't seem to scale past a few dozen before it's confusing, useless, and apparently lossy. Remember when web servers woul…

I agree with you 100%. I just want something that stores files and works with SFTP and NFS out of the box. I get so annoyed every time I have to use S3 manually.

However, there is a post on this site that has become infamous in which a commenter questions the need for Dropbox when stuff like SFTP already exists.

Post reply on HN