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Comment by hdjjhhvvhga | Hacker News Reader

> * What we need is not cloud desktops, or cloud storage. We need local desktops with a decent distributed filesystem, and vendor agnostic access to that filesystem from all our devices.

While I agree, this by itself doesn't solve the problem when you depend on such a FS for your work in a way that when you lose network connectivity, you can no longer work.

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Ideally that would be handled on the FS layer and completely transparent to all apps. Things would get synchronized once connection is restored.

You can't just synchronise things without knowing the file formats. You can't do a seamless distributed FS which allows offline changes.

Or more precisely, you can, but by choosing the most fresh file and people have lost work that way. There's a few "dropbox ate my files" stories out there.

That is usually handled by exposing a "driver" API where the relevant programs can install merging components.

And yes, default into choosing some one, with an extended interface for displaying and managing conflicts.

I assume that "decent" in the comment meant to address that?

It would have to be magical not just decent. This is not solvable on the level of the file system. You can't add a blue line to an image on one system and a red line on another system and expect the filesystem to somehow figure out how to handle that on its own. The best you can count on is the conflict being flagged with both versions exposed.

CRDTs?

Perhaps the idea of plain text/binary files is a little outdated too.

CRDT is extremely format-specific. File systems don't operate at that level. And that's before we even decide if the merged edits is what you actually want.

I mean, isn't that a potential usecase for Syncthing? If I go offline on one of my devices, my files are still locally on the system. When it comes back online, it re-syncs the other devices to use my latest files.

This is a very simple use case when you are working alone. Think about a team of people and hundreds of potentially conflicting changes to review manually.* Sometimes a tangible divide between online and offline is extremely useful.

*) Unless you believe this can be resolved by software - I'm afraid we're very far from that point yet.

But then you have to deal with conflicts in a sensible way that won't lose users files and make it simple enough for people to choose which files to synchronise.

That would have been nice. Cached 9P perhaps.

Instead we got OneDrive, Dropbox and iCloud. Ugh.

Couple of buzzwords that address this point:

* CRDTs

* "Intelligent Edge Platforms" as Ditto [1] calls them

[1] https://www.ditto.live/

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