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Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, I think it's pretty great. Can't live without it.

The client's UI is a bit odd, but at the end of the day it's really good at what it's supposed to do: Syncing files.

Performance is also great: I'm using multiple machines to write code on, and I keep my local git repo on Dropbox. I can literally save a change on my notebook and run it on some other machine 3 seconds later.

On Mac and Linux you might want to check out maestral (https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral), a third-party client that works really well.

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Thank you! The reason I ditched Dropbox was because of the bloated Mac client. Maestral looks like it might bring back the 2010-esque Dropbox client feeling (fast and efficient).

I mentioned above that I switched away; iCloud Drive is pretty mediocre since syncing sometimes doesn’t happen instantly and there’s no way to force-sync. I’ll probably move my Mac synced preferences back to Dropbox if this works well. Though I’m also worried about them deprecating their APIs since that seems to be a popular move these days.

Maestral is very interesting.

The Linux Dropbox client is essentially abandoned (it's broken both functionally and aesthetically). On this platform, it definitely does not even acceptably do what it is supposed to do, so an alternative is good for the company.

I wonder though, why Dropbox limits the syncing functionality at the API level (by not offering partial file sync).

Does Maestral count towards free Dropbox's 3-device limit or not?

Does Dropbox use proper filesystems? I considered using Amazon's S3 to host a repo but apparently it may not work properly since it's not a 'proper' file system

They’re entirely separate things. Dropbox syncs a local directory on your computer. S3 is a remotely accessible object store.

So yes, you can put a git repo in Dropbox if you want. But that’s still an altogether different thing than “hosting” a git repo like you might do with GitHub or Gitlab.

I believe they meant they'll fuse-mount an S3 store to a local directory and store a git repo in that. And presumably Dropbox will refuse to sync it because it requires the synced directory to be on one of a few specific filesystems.

A reason for the downvotes would be nice.

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