GCS works. For my own use it is just much simpler to use GCS
10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
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Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#42It feels like Google’s attention span, leadership longevity, and product development patience is roughly 3 years. Any product that survives longer than that probably has transcended beyond being a “pet project/toy” into a PR-problem or revenue-stream significant enough that it takes on a life of it’s own. As management turns over, that lease on life is renewed… https://killedbygoogle.com/ While this fosters new ideas…
You nailed it. Every 3 years google renames and rebadges their chat system. I don't even know what to call it anymore.
Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#43The 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.
As a Google employee, you almost never need to store anything on Drive, do you? I'm struggling to think of a "sync my files" workflow where corp Drive would have been the best solution if only there had been a Linux client.
Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#44GNU/Linux users are mostly a bit tech-savvy users, big of IT like dumb users, they are easy to profit from, very moderately tech-savvy ones are just needed to pull more people in so offering a bit of services with a good enough quality and something to make the experience nice enough for a tech-savvy user (like YT or Google Search with a certain set of extensions to cut ads etc) is enough to have thous users recommend those services to their less tech savvy friends and the world of mouth do the magic. More than that might be even counter-productive if show a real tangible far lower quality to the aforementioned users like most single-company show software are: crappy and outdated.
Alphabet do want data from the masses, not much from a small cohort of smart users. Invest for them is not interesting.
Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#45Worth 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.
It apparently does not, since lack of Linux support hasn't killed the product.
Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#46Do Google use Google Drive on Linux internally? Isn't Linux used a lot there?
Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
You’re missing my point.
Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#48GCS works. For my own use it is just much simpler to use GCS
Right. Don't they have a fuse file system that they actively maintain?
Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#49As 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…
It's market share, but I suspect Google's numbers may be skewed here by their measurement system. They almost certainly have hard numbers on the percent of users accessing the UI via various platform configs, and the Linux numbers are low. Question is if that's because they haven't cracked into the market because they aren't offering desktop integration.
The other interesting question is: what are Linux users using instead? Because that's Google's competition for this software, which implies how much they could make competing.
Re: 10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As a Google employee, you almost never need to store anything on Drive, do you? I'm struggling to think of a "sync my files" workflow where corp Drive would have been the best solution if only there had been a Linux client.
If you needed to share files outside of code or what have you, you would have to use Google Drive. Perhaps not all developers wind up needing this very often. But realistically, for me, the majority of the benefit would’ve been integration. I’m sorry, but browsing files in a web browser absolutely sucks. Even if double clicking a document only opened Google Docs, that would still be a usability win.
At my current workplace I use a FUSE driver to get Google Drive in my file browser and I wouldn’t have it any other way.