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

The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 590 posts

Re: The new Dropbox

#351

Post by pwthornton »

liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Just use iCloud.

I switched a few years ago. It works really well. Unless you are using Dropbox with a team or a corporate environment, iCloud is better. I use a combo of iCloud (love the desktop syncing between my machines btw), and Google File Stream for team documents.

Re: The new Dropbox

#352

Post by toper-centage »

FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #29

The blog has a loading icon? It took 10-15 seconds to render for me. Anyone else think this client-side app trend has gotten in the way of recognizing a great case for a server-side render (or even a cached page)?

Took me some good 20 seconds. All i could see was the spinner, but the page had a long scroll, meaning that the content was there. What was it still trying to load?? And in the end it loads this fugly website full of massive pictures. Where have we gone wrong as developers?

Re: The new Dropbox

#353

Post by nostromo »

Dropbox's home and landing page design language is so completely different than their actual product -- it's like they're two different companies.

Compare their disjointed design to companies that do it well, like Stripe and Apple, and it's night and day.

Re: The new Dropbox

#354

Post by josteink »

weavie wrote: post #30
disiplus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we use Google drive it has "small packages" 100 200 GB that are really cheap.

Same. It isnt as nice as Dropbox as there doesn't seem to be any linux support, so I use Grive running as a cron job. It does run on ZFS though. I never realised Dropbox didn't. I guess that puts to rest that ocasssional nagging thought that maybe it would be worth the extra £8 or so to move to Dropbox.

> It does run on ZFS though. I never realised Dropbox didn't.

It did. For years. But recently they added additional code to intentionally cripple it on non-ext4 systems.

Messing up working setups for existing users like that is just plain unprofessional.

I’m leaving, and this was the main reason: effectively no Linux-support.

Edit: after reading this announcement, I’m absolutely terrified. Setting up Nextcloud is now next on my to-do list.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a product pivot go this bad. I wonder how all the engineers at Dropbox feels about this.

Re: The new Dropbox

#355

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

> If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems

Seems like there's a really clear "SKU" that could be continued and refined, alongside this new initiative, to keep people like yourself happy, paying customers. Why would they be so shortsighted to think everyone would want this new thing?

Re: The new Dropbox

#356

Post by azinman2 »

thekyle wrote: post #329
azinman2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock market doesn’t work that way. You are legally required to grow, forever until the end of time (or your business). I think it’s one of the most toxic forces that leads to pollution, over-consolidation, etc.

As I understand it, corporations are not legally required to "grow, forever until the end of time", they are required to act in the interest of shareholders. Typically, that means returning value to shareholders of the company. Growing the company is one way to achieve that. Other ways include paying out a share of the profit the company is making via a dividend or using share buybacks to reduce the number of outstan…

Don’t utilities grow as we generally consume more and more resources?

In the Caden of dividends, wouldn’t they also need to increase over time to act in the best interest of shareholders?

Re: The new Dropbox

#357

Post by usaar333 »

Syzygies wrote: post #289
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Yes, their symlink handling is absurd, and they have the usual sanctimonious defense when questioned about this. To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong. A symlink is just a file, like any other. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cl…

You are taking strong positions on what is right or wrong when there is no objective answer and tradeoffs both directions.

> It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cloud service into special behaviour (like syncing folders elsewhere) are also wrong. You no more want a cloud service going off and "thinking" about a symlink, than you wanting it going off and "thinking" about porn it finds on your computer. These are just files; their contents or meaning are absolutely not any cloud service's concern.

Unison seems to be more designed for personal sync'ing than collaboration. That informs decisions.

First off, Unison cannot sync symlinks to Windows (or at least WinXP since they didn't exist until Vista) (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/...).

If you take your position that symlinks should be sync'd opaquely (as a file with a symlink target), collaborative relationships that involve symlinks are broken without much warning when a collaborator uses windows XP (the most popular OS when Dropbox came out!).

At least following them (which Unison does allow with a setting) ensures Windows collaborators can see them.

Dropbox could probably make the change now (few XP users remain), but you have legacy issues of existing users relying on the "follow" behavior to sync content outside of their Dropbox.

> One can declare a directory atomic, forcing the user to choose at the directory level when there’s a conflict.

Not forcing users to make choices before upsync occurs is an explicit design decision of Dropbox. It ensures that if I power on my computer after being offline, things will quickly sync to the cloud -- I don't need to spend time making decisions.

Re: The new Dropbox

#358

Post by guruz »

Legogris wrote: post #259
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Have you considered Keybase KBFS for this? You get 250 GB for free, public/private with not too much metadata getting leaked, FUSE for desktop and also access on mobile devices. I haven't actually moved over to this myself yet, but it does look much better than Dropbox or Sync.com (which I stupidly am still subscribed for despite their client being even worse than Dropbox - but at least it's encrypted...) Nextcloud m…

> Nextcloud mentioned previously is the obvious choice for the privacy-conscious, but does take some further responsibility to ensure integrity and availability.

I'd recommend ownCloud over Nextcloud as Nextcloud doesn't have file checkumming during transfer.

Re: The new Dropbox

#359

Post by LeoNatan25 »

databus wrote: post #242
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

I feel like this is going to be some huge electron-type update. Anyone know?

It is. https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1138686582859239425

Re: The new Dropbox

#360

Post by usaar333 »

It's interesting to contrast the comments here to the short stream on /r/dropbox: https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/bzfwxv/meet_the_ne...

I'm guessing most folks here aren't actually the target market anymore for Dropbox ("teams that use Dropbox as the main workspace" as one commenter phrases it)

Post reply on HN