Thanks for this. Been with Proton a while and they're not great at letting their customers know of new products. Either that or they are too successful at filtering their own marketing email.
To the OP: Proton is privacy first. I use their tools for a reason, trusting file transfer to a third party would never happen even with an open code base.
It's fine if the tool is for yourself, great for your CV and well done for shipping something. HN can at times be a cruel place, think of this as a learning experience.
They released it just few days ago (maybe 2 weeks or so). I personally got a mail in my inbox for the release, but maybe it's because I have left feedback about it or something.
A very welcome news nevertheless!
Before AI, it at most showed an interest in coding outside of work. There's a 'passion' element that might be interesting to recruiters but there's not much more to it than that.
"Sign-in happens through your browser — no password on the command line."
which I can confirm having tried it myself. It's hard to imagine what the
proton devs were thinking. Did the case of using a command line tool on a
headless or remote server never occur to them?
It's funny to me that this is how JavaScript (and PHP?) got its bad rep (before Node forced it into a tailored suit). You don't have to understand it, just copy and paste this and put it on your site.
If Proton got their devs together for a two week internal hackathon, they could build a very simple Proton client for Linux that would match functionality of Dropbox and quickly gain a lot of new customers. And make existing customers very happy thus creating free publicity to attract even more customers. Alas, their priorities are trying to upsell unnecessary products to their existing customers and not providing products they actually want. And I am saying all this as a paying Proton customer.
I work in this space with my oss work on Filestash, and its sync client https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive. A proper sync client is nowhere near a two week hackathon unless you vibe code it and don't have much care. I've been on it for 6 months and it's far from finished. Linux alone has a fragmentation problem. The sync engine can be shared, but the integration can't: tray, status, file manager overlays and notifications all work differently on GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, Omarchy, Sway. Electron looks out of place everywhere, so you end up maintaining one frontend per desktop, plus packaging for each distro. Then there's the sync itself, which is a long tail of edge cases, often platform specific. Last week I optimised the rm -rf case, FUSE hands you one unlink per file, so a folder with 10k files becomes 10k API calls unless you do clever things. Today, I've tried to optimise thumbnails, problem is the file manager opens every file in a folder just to render previews, so browsing a directory of videos can easily get uggly as well, let's not talk about the state of atomic save which if you are not clever here too will create multiple files on your server and waste bandwiths. There are many dozens of these edge cases just on linux and that's before you tackle window, mac, android, how do you handle delta sync ....
My "two week" estimate was too sarcastic. Thank you for detailed explanation about all the problems and challenges that comes up when building a file sync client. I really admire your attention to detail while trying to correctly integrate the sync engine in all different file clients.
it was very slow, and I had to re-authenticate often.
I want something like dropbox daemon, which mounts drive and syncs it. Set up once and forget. Since I have not found anything like this for Proton I am still using Dropbox for some synced data.
Considering you ignore the other post on the subject, it's clear he came to terms with it. People's opinions evolve over time, and calling someone out for having an evolving viewpoint is anti-intellectual. I think it's perfectly fine to have an opinion one year and have something else the next year, and not feel the need to delete your old writings.
I don't know, I find growth and learning important.
This is great! I recently started working on a privacy-first MCP server for proton mail, calendar and drive, written in rust that supports optional pseudonomization of identifiers in the data: https://github.com/matt-w-horn/protonctl
Supports mac and linux, but the linux part could use a bit more work.
Last time I tried ProtonDrive(years ago), the speeds were complete dogshit, I could barely surpass 10 MB/s on a half gig fibre line. Anyone used it recently, and if so has it improved?
Not sure, but that would explain how Google photos are always in sync and proton drive is always backing up my photos with 50-70 items to go (with no way to see which pictures/videos are backed up).
Often their VPN will prevent even their own sevices from working and I have to reconnect manually to make it work. Never had these issues with mullvad.
I'm generally not very happy with proton's services or apps. When this year of my payment is over I'll be switching away.
Yeah, I'm also switching away. They're very sluggish on features. I went through all the rigamarole of setting up my own domain for the email service. Specifically with the idea that I could them automatically filter all my mail into folders by service. But, as it turns out, Protonmail has very limited support for sieve extensions. The crucial one is being able to create mailboxes from sieve scripts. So I can sort emails into folders, but I'd have to go create a bunch of folders, and make a new one every time I sign up for something. I'll be switching to fastmail, I think.
Though, if ProtonDrive became fast finally, I might still be convinced to pay a smaller fee for PD plus their VPN, which is completely fine for my purposes anyway(mostly just torrenting).
I think they are spreading themselves a bit too thin by trying to have an answer to every Google feature. I would have stayed if the core stuff worked.
Would have been a lot better if they made some privacy focused API other apps could hook into and other providers could copy, and then we could create an ecosystem that replaces Google.
https://proton.me/business/drive/cli
https://proton.me/blog/proton-drive-cli
To the OP: Proton is privacy first. I use their tools for a reason, trusting file transfer to a third party would never happen even with an open code base.
It's fine if the tool is for yourself, great for your CV and well done for shipping something. HN can at times be a cruel place, think of this as a learning experience.
Caveat I am not a SWE. Is there any value in having AI developed tools on your CV?
"Sign-in happens through your browser — no password on the command line."
which I can confirm having tried it myself. It's hard to imagine what the proton devs were thinking. Did the case of using a command line tool on a headless or remote server never occur to them?
e.g tar -cf - * | <some unwieldly proton drive cmd>
I guess this is not possible due to the way the encryption works?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I am not a Go developer
what a time to be alive
I don't know, I find growth and learning important.
Why are you opposed to changing your mind?
I'm using gdrive under Linux and it's a pain. Takes 10 seconds to open a folder.
I have a proton subscription and would love to move my stuff there if it works reasonably faster under Linux than gdrive
Supports mac and linux, but the linux part could use a bit more work.
well, scrap that
I'm generally not very happy with proton's services or apps. When this year of my payment is over I'll be switching away.
Though, if ProtonDrive became fast finally, I might still be convinced to pay a smaller fee for PD plus their VPN, which is completely fine for my purposes anyway(mostly just torrenting).