How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming? | Hacker News Reader

How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming?

abevoelker.github.io

108 pointswaffle_ss59 comments

I've got it; I was at Google about a year back when they had an open beta. At that time they were encouraging everyone at the company who'd signed up to take home the beta client and install it on whatever computers they wished. It works okay; There's a bug where it will occasionally re-sync everything, but last I saw there was serious work on it.

Why haven't they released it, if it was this close to finished? I can't say. Likely bad allocation of resources and decisions by product people. Larry is chasing Wall Street targets, which has badly slowed the pace of innovation in most of the company. The moonshots are sacred and given free reign, everyone else isn't allowed to innovate.

I thought a large part of google Devs are using Ubuntu. What I don't understand is why isn't there a Linux client,ms imply for the purpose of dog-fooding?

The largest problem with Linux deployment is support. Suddenly you need a tech support team that can support Linux as well as Windows.

Blizzard had a Linux version of World of Warcraft, but can you imagine how hard it is to ensure your support staff across the world know how to handle a customer with a Linux PC?

Thanks to their unique approach to product support, Google won't have this problem though.

If you're looking for alternatives, OneDrive has been ported to Linux. It currently has 15GB free and fairly cheap plans.

https://github.com/xybu/onedrive-d/ (using https://github.com/mk-fg/python-onedrive)

(The usual disclaimer: I work for MS).

It's interesting how Microsoft is starting to feel like the lesser evil compared to Google. I wonder how many good services/companies have been killed by Google offering an inferior service for free, only to abandon the service later on.

From a guy with your moniker, I'm sure to get unbiased and fair perspectives about Google.

Judging by your username I'd say that you've already thought about this and perhaps have a somewhat biased and possibly less than reasonable opinion on the subject...

Google dropped the "don't be evil" motto in 2009 and the Google "+" search operator in 2011... I think that is when Google stopped improving (on average) and even started to degrade services for business purposes (when viewed from a user's perspective). Since the user is the product, I guess it can make sense... but I don't like it.

Don't mean to criticise the open source projects but why hasn't Microsoft done a client that runs on multiple platforms itself, or at least supported for example a Python library?

python-onedrive hasn't been touched in a month and since it doesn't support the new REST API, it's crippled for most purposes due to the heavy rate limits on the old API.

onedrive-d looks good but it's dependent on GNOME, making it impractical for many use cases, particularly on headless devices like a Raspberry Pi.

Microsoft has the power to support this better, why has it chosen not to?

That's Google - the corporate equivalent of a hyperactive 10 year old boy.

Don't get me started on this. A hyperactive 10 year old boy is still better than the overly jealous dictator that is Apple or the greedy fraudulent impertinent that is Valve. It seems to be normal that successful companies from the United States of Central North America lose common sense of how to treat people.

Wow, those were some oddly specific choices. No mention of Microsoft or Oracle (to name a few of the more popular straw men), or any of the rest of the globe?

These were no straw men. For both I have specific reasons for why I call them as I did.

I don't interact directly with Microsoft or Oracle, so there is not much I can complain about. Though, I've heard a lot.

Feel free to add more.

To be fair, it only takes a smidgen of hyperactivity to forget about the Linux desktop market.

Only if the company consists of people who aren't developers. For a while google didn't even allow windows on site, and if you look at stackoverflow statistics you'll see that Linux has as much usage as OS X amongst programmers.

As if synchronizing files is useful only for the desktop.

I was under the impression that the missing Google Drive application for Linux is a desktop application. Is that not the case? What uses for it, beyond the desktop, are you referring to?

"Desktop"'s a red herring in this context, really. What's missing is a GDrive daemon that does automatic syncing. The closest there is is https://github.com/odeke-em/drive , which requires manual push/pull.

As I understand it, the Drive API is public and well-documented (https://developers.google.com/drive/).

What's to stop, well, anyone from just implementing this and throwing it up on GitHub?

"Why did you do it?" "I guess I just got tired of waiting for someone else to do it for me."

You might want to look at http://www.lbreda.com/grive/start (also in a comment below)

I use Drive which is made by googlers. Works as advertised. https://github.com/odeke-em/drive/blob/master/platform_packa...

This is turning into a running gag. It's not like this is rocket science. Google has their client on Windows, Mac, and Android, while Dropbox is available for ... Windows, Mac, and Linux.

On the other hand, given the size of the market for people using Linux on their desktop computers, I cannot exactly blame Google for not giving a damn about it. OTOH, Chrome for Linux exists, so...

Small note: Dropbox has android/iOS/web as well and Drive has web/iOS.

As for the market, that includes a lot of their own employees does it not?

Edit: Not to say that there is a big market or that this would dictate what their priorities are, just saying I'm sure even some googlers would like drive to work well on Linux.

I'd bet that the majority of engineers at Google use OS X.

This might be true but I imagine at least some of their employees use Linux and would like to use drive from Linux.

All of google's backend code is written on Linux desktops. OSX is common for laptops, but real code isn't permitted to touch their drives.

> but real code isn't permitted to touch their drives

Do you mean one is not allowed to check out the code on OSX and sync to the dev/linux box?

When I was there, that's exactly how it worked. Obviously not the case if you were doing OSX or iPhone dev, but otherwise no code on your laptop.

That's a security rule, not an anti-OS X rule.

I still bet that the majority of engineers at Google use OS X on their primary laptops (and they still wouldn't be allowed to put the code on their laptops, even if the laptops were Linux).

Dropbox is also available for Android, and I believe iOS as well.

Linux client isn't the best, doesn't work well with KDE.

I gave up long ago and started using insync. The only downside is that I don't feel comfortable a third-party company also have access to files, but besides this, the app is really nice, works just as expected.

+1 for the insync app. Google could have a Google Drive for Linux offering overnight by simply buying them.

Here's an unofficial native client.

http://www.lbreda.com/grive/start

I've found the Insync client works pretty well.

I asked them about OAuth token usage at one point and this was the response I got:

> The "refresh token" does not leave the user's machine. This is the permanent token that we use to generate an "access token", a transient token (expires in an hour) that is used for actually communicating with the Google APIs. We sometimes send an "access token" to our servers for verification purposes, but we never store them (and they expire anyways).

Obviously it would be better not to have to trust a third-party at all, but it doesn't seem like you have to completely hand over the keys to the kingdom.

You could always roll your own: http://tshannon.bitbucket.org/freehold/

I just use the insync client - much better than the native Google Drive client anyway - even allows for multiple accounts, and selective sync (even subfolders)

(There's a Drive thingy in (Linux-based) Chrome OS, though I think it's not a synced local folder like the Dropbox client, more of a VFS with a local cache. As a different angle on Drive clients, wonder if there's anything in that that could be adapted or open sourced.)

Use owncloud. Never rely on google.

In all fairness they have a pretty robust API, couldn't someone write one if they chose?

There's a startup called InSync [1] that produces a client that works on Linux, I've used it a couple of months back and it works.

But, trusting Google (or any company) with my data is a tough pill to swallow already, because I end up storing sensitive data, like for example I've got maybe one or two pictures of my naked wife, passwords of my accounts, backups of all emails I ever had and the list can continue. Trusting Google is one thing, but also trusting an obscure intermediary that asks for access to my data - no way. In writing this comment I couldn't even find out where they are located and this is the same story for most startups.

Also, in all fairness, if Google doesn't value me as a customer, then I'm voting with my wallet. A Linux user would have to be pretty dumb to pay Google money for Google Drive when alternatives like Dropbox exist. And to tell you the truth, I'm pretty tired of not being valued as a customer, even though I'm one of those people that pay up.

And I'm also an OS X user and frankly the OS X client sucks.

[1] https://www.insynchq.com/

I think this gets to the core of the problem. The API is out there and open, yet no one (or at least not many people) have decided to try and make a nice GUI client for Linux. Perhaps it's not a problem with Google but more a problem with publishing desktop/GUI software for Linux still being a complete pain in 2015. There's a fantastic talk from Dirk Hohndel last year about how much pain he's gone through creating and publishing a dive logging GUI application for Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0 If someone like Dirk, who has access to no less than Linus Torvalds himself, has so much trouble creating a modern GUI app on Linux today then how much luck will anyone else have?

WebDAV to the rescue ;) Though it requires ditching Google.

Yes. Googlers only like their own standards.

The oCaml Google Drive software works wonder.

What am I missing by not having this?

Nothing if you are using odeke-em's client. In my experience it's more useful than Google's desktop sync client.

Drag and drop file sync is nice. Google is much more generous with free space than Dropbox is (15GB vs 2GB), so I would use them more if they had a desktop linux client.

CLI access perhaps, though there is a third party solution out there for that too. I just use chrome, which now works offline, can drag and drop into it, though not out of it, but it works well enough that I've never tried to install the sync client.

Has ExpanDrive launched their Linux client yet?

Nope, the website still says:

> Linux version coming mid-2015

Does it even matter? Google apps through Chrome are as good as native apps on Linux anyway. What am I missing by using Drive through Chrome?

File and folder syncing

Its there, you can do this through Chrome.

I look forward to living in whatever blessed future you sent this message back in time from.

With OpenSUSE Gnome, my Chrome 'apps' (Keep, Caret, etc...) show up in my app menus. They are accessible offline. I can use Drive to Sync data to my computer to access it offline. Yes, it's not exactly the same experience as say, DropBox, but if I'm using everything through Chrome anyway, it's a great experience.

This is hilarious

Pretty much everything about Google is either hilarious or sad, depending on one's point of view.

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