Back in Nov 2018, Dropbox went down this same lazy and inexcusable path, by programming their Linux client to shut down on any file system that was not Ext4.[1] I was using F2FS. Their excuse was that extended attributes support was critical to Dropbox, which is not a valid excuse since F2FS, XFS, ZFS, etc, all support extended attributes.[2] It would have been just a few lines of code to check if the user was running a filesystem that had extended attributes support. So presumably, they probably just didn't want to QA on multiple systems, so laziness won. I had to back up all my files, reformat my F2FS partition to Ext4, and restore my files, to get Dropbox working again. I've been a paying customer for 4+ years (at the $9.99/month level), and this is what I have to deal with.

Moreover, the Dropbox mobile apps and web UI still do not support editing plain text files (.txt / .md) -- even though they've added support for editing MS Doc (.doc / .docx) files. Compared to supporting editing MS Doc files, supporting plain text file editing would be so trivial for them to add, yet they haven't. I keep all my notes and thoughts in plain text files. When I don't have my Linux laptop, I'm forced to use Google Docs on my phone, even though I'd prefer to have all my notes/thoughts in my neatly organized collection text files.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any solid alternatives to Dropbox, that have reliable non-flaky support on Linux, and good iOS and Android apps.

[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux

iPhone Dropbox lets me edit txt files. I also had to reformat even though mine was ext4 but i was using ecryptfs which wasn’t supported.

Thanks for the note. They must have added .txt file editing support after I last tried editing one on their app.

For encryption, I'm using dm-crypt with LUKS on my root partition on Arch Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_...

It works pretty well. I didn't have to mess with the underlying encrypted LUKS partition/volume in order to reformat.

Actually, Dropbox's Android app does let you edit text files. It was one of the main reasons I went with Dropbox.