It 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…
3 years is roughly the average time it takes to get promoted at Google.
Or the time someone leaves and goes to another job.
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…
I don't know how many M$/yr Google engineers cost, but there is at least one small software company out there (InSync) that built a multiplatform Google Drive client which, personally, has been working great for years, even on Linux (I'm just a user), for likely less than that.
I love Insync! Very underrated and I wish more people knew about it!!
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’d take a file system that can be indexed by my local operating system (MacOS). The last MacOS update broke Spotlight indexing for my Google Drive folders. Really annoying not being able to use Spotlight (and by extension Alfred), so the only logical thing to do was move to iCloud. In the process of moving off of Google Drive, I also decided to move my email to Fastmail and just ditch GSuite (or whatever they are ca…
Spotlight no longer working with google drive — for months now — has been such a pain in my ass that it’s finally convinced me to shift my entire company off Google Workspace. At least with Microsoft I can get someone on the phone.
Internally is a lot different than externally https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
You’re missing my point.
Your point is a lot of internal developers use Linux so they should make a Linux drive client, my counterpoint is that dedicating engineering resources to building and maintaining such a project is not worth the cost. Management looks at the cost and ROI of developing and maintaining projects, in this case the ROI from having a Linux client that would likely need 5-10 SWEs to maintain is not worth it for them. They have to ensure the client is compatible with multiple flavors of Linux releases, monitor security issues etc it's a big ongoing cost. If more consumers and businesses used Linux, they could justify the cost.
I'm not saying this is the right move, but I'm explaining why this project hasn't been funded.
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 u…
I've been very happy with self-hosting a Seafile instance to serve as a personal cloud for myself and a small academic ML team. I built a small NAS, Proxmox runs on baremetal, on top of which there's an ubuntu VM running a Seafile docker instance. Fantastic performance, so so much more efficient for syncing large libraries b/w machines. Owncloud/Nextcloud was a pig for my purposes, it seemed unable to sync libraries w/ large number of files (2million+). IIRC Seafile sync client is C under the hood, and is much more performant than any other sync client I've tried. OneDrive was completely unable to upload the amt of data that I needed, and I was tired of manually splitting my datasets into chunks, only to have to stitch them back together on the shitty WebUI. Feel free to hit me with any questions if anyone is thinking of setting up a Seafile instance. I've found their 'community edition' free release to be more than sufficient for our team.
There's Google Chat, which is really made for companies but available on normal accounts too, and Google Messages, their SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android, which requires that you have an Android phone and a phone plan.
Also Hangouts, Meet, Duo, Allo, Spaces. I don't even know if all of them are alive now, and I don't care enough to check.
To be even more confusing, it’s also possible to chat and video conference with the Gmail app. But maybe this changes tomorrow who knows?
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 u…
I've been very happy with self-hosting a Seafile instance to serve as a personal cloud for myself and a small academic ML team. I built a small NAS, Proxmox runs on baremetal, on top of which there's an ubuntu VM running a Seafile docker instance. Fantastic performance, so so much more efficient for syncing large libraries b/w machines. Owncloud/Nextcloud was a pig for my purposes, it seemed unable to sync libraries…
Oh yeah, most importantly-- Linux is treated as a 1st class citizen, the sync clients are equally performant b/w platforms in my experience. In contrast to Nextcloud, Seafile is really good at one thing-- file sync&share-- and the Web UI is intuitive & full-featured for users & admin alike.
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…
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 i…
Lack of Drive integration was what kicked me to finally self-host a Seafile instance.
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…
I don't know how many M$/yr Google engineers cost, but there is at least one small software company out there (InSync) that built a multiplatform Google Drive client which, personally, has been working great for years, even on Linux (I'm just a user), for likely less than that.
It seems that headless use (NAS, VPS) requires a subscription, unfortunately.