Hi there, paying customer who’s been using odrive on macOS, Windows and Linux for a long time, and very happy with it. However, I really think its high time the Linux version had a GUI. Considering this issue has been requested for a LONG time - 6 years to be exact (I found a feature request for this on this forum from 2016) - I think its high time it is put on the development roadmap.
Each time this is mentioned, a developer says they ‘definitely understand the use case’ but that this is ‘not on the development roadmap’. May I ask, why not? I know you guys must be extremely busy building what is, in my opinion, the best sync system on the planet, but, come on - this is a GUI; a front-end for the existing CLI would be more than enough. I don’t even care about file notification integration or whatever, just a simple GUI to tell odrive what folders I want synced is more than enough.
I personally would be more than happy to donate money to this if its a resources problem, and I’m pretty sure many Linux users would follow suit. Please, seriously consider this.
Hey @keithv,
You are right! We have been too long without a Linux UI.
The truth is that a Linux UI hasn’t been able to reach a significant priority level in relation to the many, many other things that need to be done. That certainly doesn’t mean that it isn’t a legitimate feature, or that it shouldn’t be done. It basically is a resource problem, as you guessed, but it has more to do with implementation and maintenance cost and how that relates to overall company priorities, rather than monetary cost.
I know this just sounds like more of the same answer… I wish I could provide some sort of timeline or assurance that it will be done, but all I can say is that we very much appreciate your patronage and your feedback, which is seen at the highest levels of the company.
When we started using odrive way back when, the promise that a Linux UI might be around the corner was enough. That seems to have been a pie in the sky dream that odrive had no intention of ever fulfilling. For this reason I am currently in the process of migration our entire organization away from odrive.
To make our situation worse, I bought into the hype that it would somehow be worth it to have my S3 storage use odrive native rather than the standard S3 structure.
I have learned my lesson and have had enough empty promises of someday. If the “overall company priorities” don’t include making the Linux UI at the top, then it is borderline fraud to advertise that odrive supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. To use it with Linux you practically have to be a programmer. Even with my best efforts with all the scripts posted in the forums, it has never actually worked right and I am forced to run a Windows VM with a shared drive and 100% of it synced just to have access on each of my many Linux machines. That is not Linux support. Requiring users to write their own solution, and then advertising that a platform is supported is just plain despicable, and the non-answers like the one above does not make it any better.