Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up
by cmurf on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:24PM
(#9775478)
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.
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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up
by rogerbinns on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:58PM
(#9775565)
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.
Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up
by x0054 on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:50PM
(#9775552)
If BTSync can support everything under the sun by statically linking their single binary, why can't Google.
Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up
by bch on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:31PM
(#9775503)
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
Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up
by gecko on Thursday June 25, 2015 @11:26AM
(#9778585)
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).