OS-level support for cloud storage. OneDrive, Dropbox and all the others work seamlessly on Windows through the Windows API. You can browse all the files on the file system and once you access them, the OS will call back the cloud provider to download them. It works through all applications, all cloud providers.
I am aware that some tools on Linux have something similar to work around the issue in user land. Some solutions are less worse than others but none of them are as good as on Windows.
Nextcloud works that way for me. I access my Nextcloud files at ~/nextcloud without any hitch, and changes sync immediately. You do have to self-host, but I’m sure there are also some public instances you can use. I know Disroot hosts one.
Currently we have an experimental VFS feature on all platforms that is using some suffix appended to files when they are virtual empty placeholders.
https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/3668
Yeah, no thanks. It’s a very hacky work-around and breaks the moment you use an application that tries to access the files directly.
Oh you mean without downloading the files. I thought you just meant cloud sync. Yeah I have my entire Nextcloud downloaded and the folder is synced by the daemon, so I do just use the files as normal local files. Never tried without downloading all the files
My (self-hosted) cloud storage is larger than the disk drive on my laptop. On demand sync is important to me. I really, really hope Linux will catch up to Windows in that regard.
OS-level support for cloud storage. OneDrive, Dropbox and all the others work seamlessly on Windows through the Windows API. You can browse all the files on the file system and once you access them, the OS will call back the cloud provider to download them. It works through all applications, all cloud providers. I am aware that some tools on Linux have something similar to work around the issue in user land. Some solutions are less worse than others but none of them are as good as on Windows.
any of them could make it work through FUSE
Nextcloud works that way for me. I access my Nextcloud files at
~/nextcloudwithout any hitch, and changes sync immediately. You do have to self-host, but I’m sure there are also some public instances you can use. I know Disroot hosts one.Yeah, no thanks. It’s a very hacky work-around and breaks the moment you use an application that tries to access the files directly.
Oh you mean without downloading the files. I thought you just meant cloud sync. Yeah I have my entire Nextcloud downloaded and the folder is synced by the daemon, so I do just use the files as normal local files. Never tried without downloading all the files
My (self-hosted) cloud storage is larger than the disk drive on my laptop. On demand sync is important to me. I really, really hope Linux will catch up to Windows in that regard.
You can try odrive, but it’s less than ideal. Or use rclone to mount your cloud storage folders, but it requires a little more work.