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

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111–120 of 227 posts

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

#111
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

If Google made a calculated decision to not implement Drive on Linux, it wasn’t clear to me, nor did I ever hear that in or out of Google.

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

#112
post #66
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You nailed it. Every 3 years google renames and rebadges their chat system. I don't even know what to call it anymore.

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.

Not to be confused with Chat, which is inside the Google Messages app, which is RCS.

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

#113
post #20
post #7

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904387 ipv6 support in GCP is similar, it's at 9 years now.

Websockets still not generally available, ticket opened in 2009 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35886348

There's really no reason to use AppEngine these days. I believe it still exists for legacy apps. You should be using Cloud run. Cloud run support WebSockets[1].

If you already have an AppEngine App you can always keep it and create a CloudRun app to handle the WebSocket part and they communicate well.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/triggering/websockets

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

#114
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…

You want https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/. Yes it should really just be a straight up product, but for the moment you can hack it together fairly effectively.

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

#115
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.

I’ve wondered how practical using Azure Files with SMB is. It also supports NFS.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/files-s...

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

#116
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…

There is a transition from a file-centric to an app-centric model, that I mostly disapprove of, but that's what is happening. Before, you had files stored in a filesystem, you picked the file and opened it with the app. On Windows, you double-click on the file, on a command line, you type "app filename". Now the trend is to first open the app and then use the app to fetch your data, that data is entirely managed by the app and may be stored in an opaque area of a filesystem, some server on the internet, etc...

I disapprove of the "new" way (that is not so new, but it is the current trend) because it favors lock-in and general loss of control. But there are also some advantages such as being able to do versioning, syncing, collaborative work, searching and general database-like operations when your filesystem doesn't support it. A lot of popular open source "not evil" software use that model, for example, IIRC, Firefox has always stored bookmarks in an opaque sqlite database while Internet Explorer stored them as files in a folder, and I don't think I need to tell you which one is considered the most evil.

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

#117
post #9

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…

The last time I used Seafile, it was very slow, and it was more of a pain to get and keep running than it was worth, though I was using the free version instead of the paid version.

The problem with seafile I had was if I tried to sync down files and the sync client stopped, it would have no problem uploading the incomplete downloads as changes to the server, as well as pushing missing as deletes to the server.

I didn't lose any data over it, thank god, but I moved away from that.

The moral of the story is sync is a hard problem. And corner cases need to be tested before you rely upon any sync service for your data.

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

#118

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.

> it's the only one that really matters

Demonstrably not.

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

#119
post #66
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You nailed it. Every 3 years google renames and rebadges their chat system. I don't even know what to call it anymore.

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.

I think I may make an independent thread about this soon (but my question may be stupid): why does messages use this paradigm of connecting to one's phone directly instead of accessing texts in some centralized fashion? Is that impossible because only the carrier has the contents of the thread (even though other services can be used to post texts)?

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

#120
post #102
post #63

Google Drive does support Linux with the completely open source DriveFS and supporting userspace services like Seneschal in the ChromiumOS project. People who claim otherwise don't believe in actual open source software development, they just want a convenient quasi-commercial software package that doesn't cost them anything.

> they just want a convenient quasi-commercial software package that doesn't cost them anything. Wouldn't I be paying for gdrive and thus expect to get working software? The free tier isn't enough for me and I would have paid if they had a linux client. Its okay if they don't think linux is worth it, but your argument that i should pay for the software again seems really weird to me.

Again:

Google writes, maintains, distributes, and supports a working Drive client for Linux, called DriveFS.

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