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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Internally is a lot different than externally https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

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 have to ensure the client is compatible with multiple flavors of Linux releases, monitor security issues etc it's a big ongoing cost. If more consumers and businesses used Linux, they could justify the cost.

I'm not saying this is the right move, but I'm explaining why this project hasn't been funded.

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.

As a Google employee, you almost never need to store anything on Drive, do you? I'm struggling to think of a "sync my files" workflow where corp Drive would have been the best solution if only there had been a Linux client.

If you needed to share files outside of code or what have you, you would have to use Google Drive. Perhaps not all developers wind up needing this very often. But realistically, for me, the majority of the benefit would’ve been integration. I’m sorry, but browsing files in a web browser absolutely sucks. Even if double clicking a document only opened Google Docs, that would still be a usability win.

At my current workplace I use a FUSE driver to get Google Drive in my file browser and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

As a Google employee using Linux, the kind of files I stored in Drive were rarely useful synced to my filesystem.

To be clear, I would’ve preferred something more like a FUSE implementation, which thankfully exists for someone outside of Google.

There is FileStream or whatever it’s called, but it’s never coming to Linux so who cares.

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