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

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.

Consider paying for S3.

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 calling it today) forever. I’ll sleep better at night knowing that Fastmail knows their place and (hopefully) won’t try and force a chat function into my web email client as a means to build engagement for a product I don’t care about.

I agree with all of your complaints, but will say Gnome nautilus integration is working pretty well these days, and allows me to interact with it more like a filesystem than a shitty webui.

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.

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.

Actually Google did made a version of Google Drive Filestream for Linux, and made it available it Google Colab, just that they never released it publicly for unknown reason. I have grabbed the binary of it. https://github.com/michaellee8/gdrivefs/tree/master/assets

Agreed. Every time I go to save a file I have to stop thinking like a techie and put my 'think like Google' hat on. My wife is the average, basic user. Windows and Linux filesystems she navigates with no issue. Google Drive? Confuses the heck out of both of us and I've been a techie my whole life.

I'd rather that didn't happen. The current web ecosystem of adtech companies and data brokers makes the web one of the last places where I'd want to entrust my files with. And before anyone mentions permissions, I don't see that putting a stop to data harvesting. Because if that even worked, social media would not have been a thing. It has been shown that people just "willfully" give up their data without giving as much thought to the consequences. So if this web filesystem plan goes through, entire services would be built around users giving companies access to their files, and those would go straight to the ad networks. Less friction in the browser means that we'd see an exponential increase in those type of services. So the current friction is better for user privacy.

You’re still free to use a webserver with directory listing turned on..

They should take inspiration from nginx and Apache directory listings. Doesn't take 4s to load and uses actual links so you can open in new window or copy the link.

> Just give us a web filesystem already.

WebDAV is kinda that. I subscribe to a (super cheap) hosted version from Hetzner and I'm happy with it even though the server is on a different continent. As mentioned somewhere in another comment, I also use rclone mount to use it, but there are other options as well (the client built into GNOME is reasonably good, the client built into Windows 10 is terrible).

3 years is roughly the average time it takes to get promoted at Google.

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

“Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” - Charlie Munger

* see google product

* create stealth startup to compete

* wait???

* pounce on userbase when Google crashes and burns

I generally agree but I really dislike that site. Change is inevitable, as is progress.

Angular 2010-2021? Seriously? Angular was simply superseeded after 11 years by better technology, and same goes for a lot of other projects and services on that site.

I’m not a Google fanboy and I know about the few instances where they screwed over users by turning stuff off but cmon now.

I’m curious, what do you use to access files on your NAS? I’ve used Samba for forever but it’s always been kind of annoying to deal with permissions, and whilst running AD would probably solve that, I then have to deal with running AD. I’m tempted to try switching to NFS instead.

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.

My NAS of 6 years just crapped out on me a couple days ago. Probably just the power supply, but my suggestion is to get 2 NASes in RAID6 and mirror data between them if you can.

Maybe they could ship a linux app instead of deprecating and replacing the mac app next time :)

The thinking was probably more along the lines of "no one ever got promoted for filling out the basic feature set of a file share me too service" and that promotion is what's standing between them and an extra 9000 pizzas a year worth of salary. With a bonus hint of "nobody cares what somebody promised that left the team a year ago after a year of working on it".

I get what you're saying, but:

- The specific actions of a company will _always_ come from a specific subset of people who are interacting with and sometimes constrained by the broader organization. Should this mean that we can never talk coherently about the actions or statements of a company?

- Isn't the company overall responsible for creating the organizational constraints and obstacles? Why is that team that size? Why is that their remit, and how has it changed since _someone_ decided to say "hang tight"? Why do they have the staff they have?

I get what you're saying, but ultimately it is an issue of priority. Google has the money, they just don't choose to spend it on supporting Google Drive on Linux, even after saying they would. So, supporting Linux is by definition a lower priority than anything that did pass the bar for resource allocation in the last ten years.

You're right about the motivations: they must not view it as creating real business value, since that's how these decisions get made.

My only point here is that it IS a choice someone in an office is making: it's not worth it to support Drive on Linux. They do know about it, because it was on their radar 10 years ago. Somebody took it off their radar.

Though Linux might be a small platform it's the only one that really matters.

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.

The team who made the post were representing Google, therefor the company made the post.

To propose otherwise implies that all similar actions/statements made in a similar way are not made by the company, which is both ludicrous and also causes Google to not exist.

> Gnome supports Google Drive, or at least used to, directly in Nautilus. I don't use Gnome, so I can't comment.

I'm using it right now. It is not particularly responsive (perform an operation and it looks like no operation is happening until the remote end responds) but works well enough for copying files in and out via nautilus if you don't expect instant feedback.

> I connected my Gdrive as external storage in Nextcloud.

This bit sounds interesting, could you explain it a little more, how you managed it?

Does this mean you're storing a backup of your NextCloud as a large encrypted blob in your gdrive?

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but nextcloud constantly somehow manages to corrupt data it is storing locally. Its only user is an android backup agent.

Is there something that's, say, 1% as complicated as nextcloud that can sync multiple devices without giving a cloud provider access to cleartext (while also keeping an encrypted backup in the cloud)?

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 instead? Because that's Google's competition for this software, which implies how much they could make competing.

Insync is not open source.

The FSF will almost certainly never do that, and even if they did, Linux isn't licensed under "GPLv2 or Later." It's just under GPLv2, probably forever.

Linux could change it if every single copyright holder consented, but that's even less likely than the FSF adding a field of endeavor restriction to the GPL. Google owns partial copyright to Linux. Other copyright holders are gone, and nobody knows who the heir is.

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

... exactly what I was thinking. Discovering rclone mount finally let me abandon the file sync paradigm and return to my workflows of yesteryear when NFS was still the dominant file sharing system on Unix.

If something uses electron, I'll look for a native alternative.

Ripcord doesn't have the best UI and I can't open Teams calls or even links that are too long (Slack broke their API at some point) but at least it's not wasting my ram and it's responds quickly. The rare times I have to open Slack on the web I sigh and wait 2 minutes for the app to load.

I automated Prituln VPN via bash just not to have to deal with another Electron client for a damn popup on my tray bar.

They can mount GDriveFS internally as NFS, I think

To be honest I like, forgot this -- attaching/syncing Drive and the local disk -- was a thing people did.

I just like, upload and download files as needed to Drive? I don't really have a huge "need to sync files to the cloud" quadrant in my personal or professional life.

Not really. I mean, drive stuff is used here and there to share some docs/attachments, etc. but not via a mounted filesystem, just from web browser.

There's a Google-wide shared file system that is mounted on all gLinux workstations, but it has nothing to do with Google Drive.

I can't thank you enough!

Yeah, looks like they broke the groups page, which was 'migrated' from an original Plus page at https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadMcCullough/posts/SxDNKR7ehS...

Yeah, I'm confused why no one else is discussing this. Who even said to hang tight? Was it someone on a Drive team? Was it a trusted community member? Was it just a optimistic Linux fanatic?

There is missing context.

That support comes from Gnome Online Accounts.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeOnlineAccounts/Provider...

Last time I tried it, that only supported the virtual drive thing, so no actual files locally.

Dropbox works on zfs, xfs and btrfs just fine.

Source: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/syste...

> 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.

Right. Don't they have a fuse file system that they actively maintain?

I suspect that there's a fundamental conflict in semantics somewhere between drive and posix filesystems. Any sort of filesystem wrapper on top of drive would immediately require making annoying compromises, and the trade-off is convenience vs. data safety.

Targeting a locked down OS like Windows or Mac isn't too difficult, because those compromises can be carefully implemented in a way that avoids accidental data corruption but doesn't negatively impact user workflow too much. On a Linux system, there's hundreds if not thousands of configurations that folk would expect a filesystem to work in, and so it's a lot more difficult to strike that balance.

Years ago, I remember a coworker dragged a directory around on his MacBook, and it completely flattened the company's entire drive directory structure.

When I worked at Google, almost all developer workstations were running Linux. That alone really should be plenty of justification for having such a client. They did not.