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.
I’ve been using odrive since 2017. There’s still no Linux support. It’s been years!!! How hard is it really to just build a GUI around the agent? People have been asking for this for at least 8 years now.
I find it offensive that the official response is to redirect to a community member’s side project, meanwhile official development seems to be active for new integrations and storage providers.
It’s a shame really, because I love odrive. I love the selective sync, multiple providers, and most importantly the ability to spread my folders across different drives as opposed to being forced to use a single root folder. (I sync roughly 11TB of data across different HDDs)
The Linux space has no proper sync software. I know this because Linux has been my daily driver for 6 years now. A small investment in developing a Linux solution could go a long way for odrive and could actually onboard untapped new users and be revenue generating. Odrive could easily dominate in the Linux sync category. It’s even more sad because the functionality is already there with the Agent/CLI. Y’all just need to build a system tray wrapper around it. Don’t even worry about Nautilus/Dolphin/Nemo integration.
Anyways, enough rambling. I’ve loved your software but I’ve had enough, and don’t want to dual boot anymore. It seems like you guys don’t care! I’ll keep my eyes open and check odrive every once in while.
Hi @hsbhsb,
Your feedback is appreciated, your grievances are legitimate, and we are certainly grateful for your years of odrive use.
Unfortunately with Linux never climbing beyond a small fraction of 1% of our client usage, Linux interest has never been high enough to justify a business case for developing, maintaining, and supporting a UI.
I know this doesn’t really help, but I just wanted to let you know that we understand where you are coming from and apologize for the inconvenience caused by not having a Linux UI.