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Almost two weeks ago, someone on GNOME’s Discourse forum asked whether the missing Google Drive support in GNOME 50 was a bug or a deliberate decision.

GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi replied, confirming that Drive was no longer supported.

He went on saying that libgdata, the library that coordinates communication between GNOME apps and Google’s APIs, has gone without a maintainer for nearly four years. Furthermore, GVFS dropped its libgdata dependency about ten months ago, and GNOME Online Accounts now checks for that before offering the Files toggle under its Google provider settings at all.

I appreciate that the author suggests that Google take on maintenance of the Drive integration. I’d rather volunteers work on supporting open platforms and protocols, which seems to be what they’re doing.

Which reminds me: I need to get a Syncthing server set up.

Oh damn. I was at a shitty startup once which uses macs/windows with google everything and additional external services. Worked through thunderbird and drive also through KDE’s KIO.

While I wouldnt want to maintain these things (similar to exchange support in thunderbird or DRM support in Firefox) they are extremely important for harm reduction.