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Comment by rogerbinns | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that Dropbox is currently "lucky" that they support (and work well) on Linux, while none of the competitors do. That at least means everyone can use it together, without requiring multiple solutions.

Their "business accounts" implementation is incredibly poor for people who already use Dropbox (ie the people to best please and most likely to spread the good word). For some bizarre reason they decide on this weird merge of one business account and one personal account. If you have more than one of either then tough luck. If you don't want your personal stuff and your business stuff co-mingled then tough luck too. If you want exceptionally confusing web pages with hostile flows, then they have you covered. (Yes, I just set up another one today and it was beyond painful.)

What they should have done is how Google etc handle it. You login with multiple accounts, have a selector between them and everything just works.

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This was my experience as well. I had to destroy my personal account once I left the company because they couldn't unmerge them and transfer to a new account. This was like 3 months ago and I was shocked that they still didn't have this fixed.

Now we use Google Drive and it just works, figures out accounts, has great permissions stuff for teams, etc.

Alas, Google Drive (used to?) suck on Linux.

There's still no official google drive client you can install on linux. WHich is bizarre, considering chromebooks run linux and obviously sync with drive.

That is not bizarre at all - it'd be like complaining about OSX apps not working on Mach BSD even though that's what OSX is built on top of.

When companies build on open source, they generally don't make it easy for you to use the base product without their extensions.

So for all intents and purposes in terms of a platform, OSX != BSD and ChromeOS != Linux.

Google has a history of acknowledging the existence of consumers on Linux, and has published Linux binaries for various closed source products in the past. I am writing this comment to you at this moment using one such piece of software.

Does Apple have a history of publishing applications built for non-Apple BSDs?

Well, Apple gave us CUPS. Plus, recently they announced Swift will be supported on Linux, too. Now I'd be really happy if they also ported iTunes to Linux (I'm currently forced to run the Windows version in VirtualBox) - or at least make their iOS devices more Linux-friendly. IMHO there is hope.

Apple gave us CUPS.

CUPS was first released in 1999 and was adopted by most Linux distros soon after. Apple first adopted CUPS in 2003. It wasn't until 2007 before they bought the rights to the source code, hired the main developer and took over the development.

It's not a linux kernel issue, it's a distribution "no bundled libraries" and packaging issue. Google doesn't want to maintain dozens of binaries (and their respective packages) in order to support dozens of distributions. It may be that containers can sorta solve this, a single container that can run on any distro that has container support. But this is still not anywhere as straight forward as say OS X where DropBox (like many other applications) are simply drag and drop into /Applications to install, or uninstall.

Google should punt and release a library and let application developers worry about working with distributions.

Edit: never mind. They have published specs. Are they not good/stable or have no devs stepped up yet? https://developers.google.com/drive/web/about-sdk

Probably a mix of that and the fact that Drive supports a hybrid of traditional folders and tagging that you can't ignore (it would break things) and you can't cleanly implement on Linux (there's no real reliable mechanism to support tags that works on XFS, ext4, and Btrfs, which seems like the bare minimum today you'd need to cover).

If BTSync can support everything under the sun by statically linking their single binary, why can't Google.

This is the same Google that has Chrome bundled for Linux? And Google Earth, Android SDKS/virtual machines, and who knows what else.

They can and have done packaged Linux software.

One thing I've been waiting for is the possibility of using both private and company Google Drive at the same time, but at least according to faq this is not yet supported: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2405894?hl=en

I can't imagine people using linux is any significant portion of their 400million users.

But fun fact: I visited the dropbox office once (it was like an adult playground) and recall seeing a cultish motivation poster that said something along the lines of "the linux client was written by one person on a plane in two hours".

The client was just a python program that leveraged a cross platform gui toolkit (source: my Linux laptop and gdb). So imagine getting it to work on Linux wasn't that hard.

I worked on a similar project that even shipped its own FUSE filesystem for osx and Linux (windows used cbfs iirc). Our client had very little platform-specific code.

It's the same reason most restaurants offer vegetarian dishes. You're not just losing the business of the few percent that are vegetarians - you're losing the business of groups that include vegetarians.

(The analogy is incomplete since you'll also get people who don't want to get locked out of Linux even though they don't currently use it)

Also Linux users are very overrepresented in the propellerheads group that you are targeting in the takeoff phase of a DB/Drive like product.

I personally don't think that dropbox supporting Linux make them successful. I would love to see the percentage of Dropbox users using Linux (I guess it's very low). Dropbox is successful because they had great PR and marketing strategy. However, if they want to stay the leader they need to make huge improvements especially for company cloud storage. If you have a company of 20 or more people, the costs of Dropbox are ridiculous.

> My experience is that Dropbox is currently "lucky" that they support (and work well) on Linux, while none of the competitors do. That at least means everyone can use it together, without requiring multiple solutions.

Pretty much. First class support for Windows, Android, and Linux is the only reason I'm still with DB. If OneDrive (for example) were to deliver proper Linux support, they'd be done for me.

OneDrive and Google Drive do not support file names that start with a period (.) and other special characters that are allowed in most operating systems. That's a non-starter for me.

One competitor that has excellent support for Linux is Wuala by LaCie, the hard drive manufacturer. Although no longer free they take security seriously and in my experience of using it for about 2 years I have never had a problem. In fact I didn't begrudge paying for storage when it went non-free as I was by this time happy with it. I use it almost daily on Win, Linux and OS X.

Wuala hasn't updated their social accounts or blog since January, and recent comments by Wuala's users seem to be mostly negative. Does Wuala have a future?

That i cannot answer. Late last year they killed the free service and gave everyone time to either move their data or become a paying customer. They had a "whatever plan you pay for we'll double the storage" offer on. I only use it mostly for moving files between the 3 main OSes and some document storage. I found that I was quite happy with the free service so why not pay and continue using it?

They must have had their reasons for stopping the free service, probably financial, so what happens now I don't know. How many free customers converted to paid?

I mentioned Wuala mainly because they claim to take seriously security of your data and because it works well on OS X, Win & Linux.

I use http://www.copy.com which supports Windows, Android, and Linux. The Linux client isn't as smooth or hassle free as DropBox, but it does work.

DropBox's handling of multiple accounts is atrocious in general. It's clear that they were worried about people using multiple free accounts, but they should at least accommodate people using (say) a paid business account and a free personal account.

All of the accounts I use are paid. It seems rather stupid to harm your paying customers the most! They could have solved the multiple free account issue by only allowing one free account logged in at a time.

It certainly seems stupid to mishandle someone with multiple paid accounts. I, on the other hand, have a pretty large free account with Dropbox which I acquired by evangelizing them, and have had various paid accounts from companies I worked for. Do you think it makes more sense to harm me?

Presumably their concern is someone creating 10 free accounts, and pooling/using them simultaneously. If their software and website (at the same time) supported any number of paid accounts with at most one free account then neither you nor I would be harmed.

I think I have about 40GB of free storage with DB as a result of working there referral system. However, a friend bought some Android based phone, came with DB pre-installed, and he has something like 500GB or free storage. They were doing some promotion.

I think one of the main issues with DB is that it is too little space and too much cost to add more. Considering what they pay for bandwidth, any paid plan really should be unlimited.

Dropbox does support a paid business account and a personal account. The paid business account just needs to be a Dropbox for Business account.

The issue is that it doesn't support these simultaneously. While you can do this pseudo-merge of a personal account into a business account, it is clunky, problematic to undo, and only helps with exactly one business account and one personal account. If you have more of either than tough luck.

Is that a Linux or Windows feature? Because Google Drive on OS X doesn't allow you to have more than one account configured.

He's talking about account in general, not the desktop app.

Google Drive's desktop doesn't support multiple accounts, but you can always visit web version of your other account and get files from there.

It's funny how a company like Dropbox that obsesses over simplicity can get so much of their product wrong! I'm not sure if its lack of talent or focus. But all indications are, they are not short on talent...

Why doesn't Amazon Cloud Drive have a Linux client?

> none of the competitors do

My second such comment in 1 minute on this but nonetheless, SpiderOak works well with Linux.

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