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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

Cool to hear about a revamp. It confuses me why some projects use a well-known open source name. In Linux, it's primary desktop environment (Gnome) uses Nautilus as a file manager. Dropbox even has a package for Dropbox/Nautilus integration.

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Yeah whenever I hear Nautilus, the first thing that comes to mind is the file manager.

But I suppose most dropbox users are on mac/windows.

What alternative have Linux users to Dropbox, to using their own server? (That is, for a number of reasons for most people, suboptimal)? You cant really use OneDrive365, and Dropbox offers vast support to Linux, is easy to set and can be used for free too. Is there a reason why Linux users wouldn't use it? Asking for curiosity.

Every desktop Linux user could use Dropbox and still most users of Dropbox would probably be Windows and Mac.

> Is there a reason why Linux users wouldn't use it

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/14/dropbox_encrypted_l... ?

> Dropbox offers vast support to Linux

Dropbox only supports unencrypted ext4 filesystems on Linux, so I would not use the phrase 'vast support'.

Because there are many popular desktop options for Linux that don't use ext4 and non-encrypted as their default?

RHEL family is XFS-centric, and quite a few distros (including Ubuntu) offer encryption in the default installer.

ext4 on encrypted devices, such as dm-crypt/LUKS, is supported. What is not supported are encryption filesystems that are 'filesystem overlays', such as ecryptfs.

(Since I was using ZFS, I am still debating whether to stay with Dropbox after November's filesystem apocalypse.)

FYI, you can still use ecrypt fs with dropbox. Put the encrypted store within your dropbox, and mount it outside your dropbox. From the dropbox point of view, you have thousands of files with gibberish as names.

OwnCloud supports Linux [1]. If you want a SaaS version, they have several hosting partners [2].

[1] https://owncloud.com/client/ [2] https://owncloud.org/hosting-partners/

Better go with Nextcloud than ownCloud. Nextcloud is the fork by the original developer team, and has quite a few nice improvements compared to ownCloud (e.g.: video and text chat, e2e encryption)

Didn't know about the fork. Thanks for the suggestion, will check it out.

keybase's kbfs is my dropbox-style replacement. It works really well in my experience

kbfs is a network filesystem, whereas Dropbox provides file synchronization. kbfs does not work when you are offline, whereas with Dropbox the files are always available locally on your machine.

Seafile is great

Yeah but that is a different group.

"A large percentage of linux users, use dropbox" does not equal "A large percentage of dropbox users, use linux".

Seafile (https://www.seafile.com/en/home/).

I use SpiderOak One [1] which is a privacy focused alternative to Dropbox. I run it on Ubuntu (and previously on Debian and Arch Linux). There's no free tier like there is with Dropbox though.

[1]: https://spideroak.com/one/

There is Syncthing which looks good on paper, but it lacks an iOS client. I'd love it if someone developed even a read-only iOS app for it.

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

I'm mostly a windows user but have some exposure to Ubuntu and had never heard of Nautilus

You never used a file manager? That was a tiny, little exposure. :-)

I think Ubuntu renames Nautilus to "Files".

GNOME does.

It's funny because the only reason I know of Nautilus on Ubuntu is from installing Dropbox. To use the Dropbox daemon on Ubuntu you have to install it and then restart Nautilus.

That's why open source projects need to register their trademarks. That's how Gnome managed to stop Groupon from ripping off the name for their own project.

Clear disconnect from the open source community, which isn't a negative signal, but also is not a positive one.

Yeah, its enough that I am actively disinterested. Seemz like the opposite of goodwill.

Yeah, this seems unnecessarily confusing to me. It's an internal project, so it's not like the name matters for advertising or anything.

Surely it's just common courtesy to not step on top of an actively developed, very popular project that is directly related to file management.

Isnt this a proprietary backend program that users will never know about? Who cares

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