This was really exciting to read. The ability to seamlessly integrate with the OS. We already do it with SSHFS and NFS; but bringing Dropbox's sync, versioning, and offline caching would be great.
Then I saw that it's not available on Linux. Which is really surprising, since supporting arbitrary filesystems is IMO dead-easy on Linux, and the easiest of the three desktop OSes. And since our company uses only Linux workstations (except for the designers), this is immediately unavailable to us. This is disheartening.
It is a shame that it went unwritten for an operating system where writing this functionality should be significantly easier (via FUSE or similar user-space file system) than Windows/MacOS.
Yea I was waiting to see if they were going to talk about Linux in the video. They didn't.
This is low level enough that it'd have to be implemented as a FUSE layer, which could add quite a bit of complexity. I wonder how they're going to deal with Linux. Will it still just sync everything?
How would writing it as a FUSE fs add complexity, as compared to whatever (which we don't know) they've done on Windows and OS X? FUSE is built for stuff like this. If anything, it should be easiest with FUSE.
And then they could have used the same codebase for Windows with Dokan (which has FUSE compatibility) and OSXFuse, although those two aren't installed by default. (FUSE is).
An overlay filesystem has a lot of advantages over FUSE. Mostly, if it crashes the user can still see their files. Implementing it with FUSE makes everything much more severe.
Uhhh ... where did the comparison between overlaying fses and FUSE come from? Overlaying of filesystems is for completely different purposes. It's not even suitable for Dropbox's Project Infinite — what would it be overlayed upon? How would dropboxd send/receive file info/data to/from the overlaying fs's driver?
The mere use of FUSE doesn't make an fs complicated or things "severe". It's just a really simple API made available to userspace processes. In fact, you can build an fs in FUSE that does overlaying itself, using multiple, isolated processes. Or you can use a single, simple, small process to implement a simple fs. FUSE is literally just the glue that would allow something like dropboxd to send/recieve file info/data to/from the VFS.
Uh, this is exactly the type of thing that FUSE is good for. Doing this as a FUSE layer would be way way easier than for Windows (unless they used Dokany[1], and they probably didn't) or god knows what you have to do to get OS X to support user-space filesystems.
I've never really been able to get Dropbox to cooperate with Linux, even when I've used Ubuntu. I'm surprised none of these cloud services have made an Electron cloud application for their services now that Electron and nw.js are more common these days.
I've been using Dropbox with Linux for a long time. It's THE reason for why I'm paying for Dropbox, because none of the other mainstream alternatives are supporting Linux. Which is preposterous given that Linux is the most popular choice for servers, including home servers. But then companies like Google or Microsoft don't give a shit, since for them cloud storage is just a complementary to lure you in to their other stuff and Linux users are not really their target.
So if Dropbox doesn't keep supporting Linux, I'll drop them like they are a hot potato. I do hope they won't make that mistake, because their continued Linux support has been the main sign that they care about me, their customer. And I don't want half-baked support either. I want it to be a first class citizen. Because I'm paying 14 EUR per month for my Dropbox account, amounting to 168 EURs per year, which isn't cheap at all. Yeah, yeah, it's the price of 5 coffees, but if I'd pay that price for everything I use, I'd be broke.
> Electron and nw.js
These would take care just for the UI, which for the purpose of doing file synchronization amounts next to nothing.
Seafile supports Linux and works phenomenally well. I've been using it for a couple years now. Don't trust its encryption (just like you should not trust Dropbox's encryption claims), but from a utilitarian point of view, Seafile is great!
Plus, when it comes to data/file sync tools like Dropboox, we need interoperability with existing tools: File Managers, filesystems etc. Not GUIs. Electron et al. are good for cross-platform GUIs, not CLIs or daemons.
I only mention Electron as an option since they don't attempt to get anything working, also I would mostly use these services on my own desktop, on a laptop I rather download files I need via a website interface directly.
Then I saw that it's not available on Linux. Which is really surprising, since supporting arbitrary filesystems is IMO dead-easy on Linux, and the easiest of the three desktop OSes. And since our company uses only Linux workstations (except for the designers), this is immediately unavailable to us. This is disheartening.