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What Dropbox Dropping Linux Support Says (techrepublic.com)
Jack Wallen, writing for TechRepublic: For a company to support Linux, they have to consider supporting: Multiple file systems, multiple distributions, multiple desktops, multiple init systems, multiple kernels. If you're an open source developer, focusing on a single distribution, that's not a problem. If you're a company that produces a product (and you stake your living on that product), those multiple points of entry do become a problem. Let's consider Adobe (and Photoshop). If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that? Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs, Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME, Mate, KDE, systemd? You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?
It becomes even more complicated when companies consider how accustomed to the idea of "free" (as in beer) Linux users are. Although I am very willing to pay for software on Linux, it's a rare occasion that I do (mostly because I haven't found a piece of must-have software that has an associated cost). Few companies will support the Linux desktop when the act of supporting means putting that much time and effort into a product that a large cross-section of users might wind up unwilling to pay the price of admission. That's not to say every Linux user is unwilling to shell out the cost for a piece of software. But many won't.
It becomes even more complicated when companies consider how accustomed to the idea of "free" (as in beer) Linux users are. Although I am very willing to pay for software on Linux, it's a rare occasion that I do (mostly because I haven't found a piece of must-have software that has an associated cost). Few companies will support the Linux desktop when the act of supporting means putting that much time and effort into a product that a large cross-section of users might wind up unwilling to pay the price of admission. That's not to say every Linux user is unwilling to shell out the cost for a piece of software. But many won't.
Surely the OS is providing standard access to every FS, so from an application perspective everything looks the same. So why is it a problem for applications to support ext4 and btrfs when, via the OS, they should look the same?
fopen() will still work, regardless, surely... no?
Why would an image editing program give 2 shits about: ext4, btrfs, GNOME, Mate, KDE and systemd?
I thought Slashdot of all places would be free of the old Microsoft FUD from the 90s about how supposedly fragmented Linux is and how Linux users don't want to pay for software because Linux itself is (usually) free... The reality is that from an application developer's perspective Linux is about as fragmented as Linux and OSX if you can use some pretty basic principles and Linux users do pay for software if good paid software is available. It's also kind of ridiculous for SystemD to be brought up here when application developers don't need to work with it and it's pretty much universally used at this point.
But hey, gotta bait those clicks somehow right?
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
There is a ton of applications on Linux that all do not have these problems. It just requires a bit of experience and not using every damned feature some specialized installation may have. Apparently, Dropbox is lacking the skills for that though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Let's take the case of Adobe porting Photoshop to linux.
1: ext4/btrfs - This does not matter at all. There is no case where photoshop cares about the filesystem it runs from.
Ubuntu/Fedora - Not really a problem. I personally run Fedora, but fedora don't have any problems running binary software developed for Ubuntu. Case in point: Most of the games I have in my Steam library are developed for Ubuntu, and have newer been tested on Fedora by the devoper at all. But they still run fine on Fedora.
Gnome vs Mate vs KDE - Again: Why should Photoshop care? None of my other apps really care so why should Photoshop?
Case in point: Even if I replace Kde which I currently use with a version of Enlightenment which I have compiled my self, none of my software will stop working. Apps don't care.
systemd: If Photoshop cares about my init system, something have gone really really wrong. No issue at all.
You can always statically compile your libraries in, especially those that might end up being problematic.
l wrote software that creates and syncs and *bootable* copy of a Linux machine. To have the clone boot and run right, everything needed to be copied over exactly - extended attributes included.
It CAN be hard if you try to do it using the approach you are thinking of, but there is a much easier way. JavaScript programmers will recognize these two different approaches.
> does the file system support symlinks, does it support locking? Can we reliably see if the file changed while we tried to sync it?
stat() will tell you if the file is a symlink and when it last changed. If this file is a symlink, then it supports symlinks. You don't need to ask "does this filesystem support symlinks?", you just use stat() to find out what kind of file this is.
> How about basic or extended attributes?
Same thing. getxattr() will give you the extended attributes, if there are any. You don't need to start with detecting the filesystem and try to figure out if xattrs are possible, just use the getxattr() system call to read the extended attributes. You'll either get some or not.
> Try that with /dev/zero and wait for your server space to fill up. Then download the already uploaded contents of /dev/sdb onto the current system.
Remember when you called stat() earlier to get the file type and see if it's a symlink? That also tells you if it's a device file. So already done.
Let's say you have really dumb programmers who don't know, and can't learn, that you get file information with stat(). Devices are in /dev. Don't copy the contents of files in /dev. You don't have to think about /dev/zero, /dev/random, etc - just know /dev is device files. Our system skipped /dev and /proc. Or just use rsync - it does the right thing by default. If you don't want to USE rsync, spend 30 minutes reading the rsync man page and do what rsync does. Those are options if you're too dumb to use stat().
None of this depends on which filesystem, init system, or kernel is in use - you won't find a bunch if "if filesystem is reiserfs" in rsync.
Back in the day you used to see two types of JavaScript. Dumb JavaScript looked like this:
if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('MSIE 5') != -1) //we think this browser is IE5 // Can't use document.documentElement.getBoundingClientRect, give up // Code for Safari ...
{
} elsif (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari') != -1) {
rect = document.documentElement.getBoundingClientRect()
Smart JavaScript does this instead:
if(typeof document.documentElement.getBoundingClientRect != "undefined");
{
rect = document.documentElement.getBoundingClientRect();
}
Just see if the feature is available, don't try to guess which browser it is and then try to figure out which features it has bases on the useragent.
Linux is even easier. getxattr() is always there, it always works. If there aren't any extended attributes, it'll return none.
Linux is primarily used as a web server, as heavy corporate back-end infrastructure, or by hobbyists/enthusiasts. Dropbox's primary market are consumers on Windows, which only has the features you buy from someone, or the mobile market which needs, I guess, a place to store and share their dick-pics.
Nothing about a web server should want to have anything to do with drop-box. It's already public, and drop-box has their own web server.
The corporate world is highly allergic to drop-box as an enterprise storage medium. They all have other ways or other deals in place for any cloud storage they need, and it's not going to be public, nor part of their back-end infrastructure. Even for their end windows users, dropbox is usually forbidden under pain of termination.
Hobbyists/enthusiasts realize their linux already has scp (all the distributions at this point), and so does any machine they may use. So they have DIY dropbox. Add in that this particular market is somewhat more distrustful of cloud-anything, and often has a more privacy and "my data is mine" and "my personal information is mine" bent and the pool of good customers here gets pretty small.
So you have an OS that isn't going to ever be a big player on your product, and you're hurting for cash. So you can fire some devs and drop support for Linux. That's what I think this means.
Bottom line: Jack Wallen doesn't know what he is talking about. Nothing to see here, move along.
First of all: the premise of the article is completely wrong: Dropbox isn't actually dropping support for Linux! The author wrote this entire nonsense article, then when "cvoltz" commented and pointed this out, they added an UPDATE to the top clarifying. The update completely undermines the point of the article. Also, the article provides "reasons" that are just generalizations with no technical backing. I won't rebut them because other posters have already done so. Also note that this author does not represent DropBox. So really, there's no substance here.
While there are differences between Linux distros, and yes it can be a pain sometimes (mostly dealing with installation and dependencies, in my experience), none of the items listed are valid examples of those difficulties. The entire article should just be retracted.
From the comments sections:
P. B. Lecavalier • 7 days ago
I wrote a detailed comment demonstrating how this "award-winning" author has seemingly no idea of what he's talking about. It was swiftly deleted. Fine. I'll leave you with your spectacle of illusions.
This is all bullshit:
For a company to support Linux, they have to consider supporting: Multiple file systems, multiple distributions, multiple desktops, multiple init systems, multiple kernels.
* You do not need to support multiple file systems. The kernel does that for you. Also most people use EXT-something.
* You need ONE deb and ONE rpm. If your build-system would be anything modern this would be done automatically. You could even cooperate with package maintainers from distributions. Beside that it is easy to package something for debian/ubuntu. And I cannot imagine that this is super difficult for Fedora, SUSE, etc.
* For a working desktop-service you do not need to support multiple desktops. You just need a running client service. Furthermore, you just need an open API, people will add tiny applets to ease shit. Also if you support Nautilus and Dolphin (or whatever it is called) then that would support almost everyone. For the rest see open API.
* You do not need to support multiple init system, because it is a user service. It should not run when not logged in.
* You do not need to support different kernels. You link with glibc. Period.
Instead of lying to us, just say the truth. Linux users are few, they often do not use you paid services, and they often use evil Nextcloud setups anyway. We need to make more revenue and cut costs. We also love to take from the OSS community, but we do not really care about them.
...of Linux on the DropBox?
Because that has never been a problem before, when dealing with oddball solutions of past filesystems. Deal with it the same way - a metadata file that holds the crap that the filesystem doesn't deal with well.
For example, we've all seed the .DS_Store files on any fileshare that a Mac has visited, which holds Finder metadata that would be written to the HFS file system if it were HFS, and otherwise sits in a metadata file everywhere else. No, it's not the cleanest way to work, but it's something that Dropbox could implement in about two hours and be done with it, because this is a long-solved problem, and we don't need a new shaped wheel.
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