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Comment by rethab | Hacker News Reader

Mac and Windows means 'universal compatibility'? :(

I think it's an unfortunate situation resulting from the need to be realistic about releases. If something can be released now for > 90% of the users then companies will prioritise doing that and then releasing the remaining 10% later.

The problem is when that remaining 10% takes way longer than expected.

Or never :(

Looking at you Google Drive.

And even though I've been a happy Linux user for more than a decade, 10% is very generous.

Especially since this is only part of their Business product for now.

To be fair, that's a decent start. Especially if you're looking at prioritising where your customer base is. Linux is important, but nowhere near as much in comparison for the average consumer/business.

It is a very decent start, it's just not "universal".

Dropbox is disproportionately popular with Linux users though, given their great Linux clients.

That's as may be, however, what % of their users are on Linux is the question they needed to answer when deciding on initial platform support.

Linux is also a much larger target than Mac OS or Windows ... different filesystems, desktop environments etc. etc.

"different filesystems": maybe not. This new Dropbox thing is a network filesystem so it could just use normal syscalls to read and write files on any filesystem the ~/Dropbox directory and be (local) filesystem agnostic.

After all you can bypass the problem by running a Windows VM in VirtualBox with guest additions and a shared filesystem. Is another way to map the Windows Dropbox's network filesystem to the Linux one, whatever it is.

Still, very cumbersome and probably slow. I remember not stellar performances with sharing files between host and guest OSes in that way.

Hopefully Dropbox will release the API and somebody will write a user mode filesystem to interface this new service.

> different filesystems

You're looking at the wrong end of it. Dropbox doesn't have to deal with any filesystem, Dropbox instead needs to build a filesystem.

It doesn't have to deal with any filesystem because Linux abstracts it. The same abstraction allows it to build its own filesystem really, really easily. How easy? I wrote, mounted, and used a filesystem in less than fifteen minutes. In node.js. It's that easy.

> desktop environments

Dropbox doesn't need to support various desktop environments, just a stable API for the desktop environments (actually, just file managers) to use. Isn't this how Nautilus, Thunar, Dolphin et al. already support Dropbox's existing features?

That may be true compared to other synchronization solutions on Linux, but I doubt Linux users make up a disproportionate amount of their customer base.

No, but it would be a marked shift in their attitude towards Linux if they just never brought cool new features to it.

Not saying they're doing that here, I'm sure it'll take time to implement.

Linux users evangelise Dropbox more than other users.

I expect their revenue isn't disproportionately from Linux users though.

Meh... https://github.com/joe42/CloudFusion

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