Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

[Posted June 16, 2020 by corbet]

Nikita Prokopov reviews Syncthing (a file-synchronization system) and, seemingly, rediscovers free software: "Syncthing is everything I used to love about computers. It’s amazing how great computer products can be when they don’t need to deal with corporate bullshit, don’t have to promote a brand or to sell its users. Frankly, I almost ceased to believe it’s still possible. But it is."

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 17, 2020 0:34 UTC (Wed) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

I've been using Syncthing for what seems like forever (it's probably been five years). It is indeed "old-school" in having no ulterior motive, hidden agenda, or goal other than being better with each release, in a steady evolution.

The people involved are also approachable, professional, and they do everything in the open. Great software, too. :)

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 17, 2020 4:31 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (3 responses)

I found Syncthing when Dropbox decided to stop supporting Linux variety; I forget now what their problem was, but it seemed more like a petty rationalization than any real problem.

Syncthing did install easily, but it took me a while to get comfortable with not being able to send a cloud link for others to see something. I liked, and like even more now, the separation of sync from providing outside access, but it did take a while to get used to after Dropbox.

It also runs fine on Mac and Android, for which I have experience; and I believe Windows too, for which I have no experience. I eventually used the ".stignore" feature to keep specific files and dirs off each node, and that is trivially easy to.

It really does just run and run. Every once in a while, my rural ISP has problems, and enough of that confuses Syncthing, but a simple ^C and restart gets it up again in seconds.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 17, 2020 11:13 UTC (Wed) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

> It also runs fine on Mac and Android, for which I have experience; and I believe Windows too, for which I have no experience.

Syncthing works very well on Windows. SyncTrayzor is generally recommended to make it more Windows-y, though.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 19, 2020 12:43 UTC (Fri) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link] (1 responses)

> I found Syncthing when Dropbox decided to stop supporting Linux variety; I forget now what their problem was, but it seemed more like a petty rationalization than any real problem.

Dropbox started demanding the use of unencrypted ext4 to house its directories; that was the end of it for the XFS-using me.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 20, 2020 15:53 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

They backtracked eventually after months of not responding but yeah the damage has been done by then.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 17, 2020 7:19 UTC (Wed) by fwiesweg (guest, #116364) [Link]

The remainder of the blog is quite enjoyable, too, especially when having a mediocre day and needing a good rant about web apps, spelling out all that feels wrong when coding them ;-)

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 17, 2020 13:33 UTC (Wed) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

I've used Syncthing in the past for the home and I probably should use it more. :-)

At the moment we use Nextcloud at our company, which is the Dropbox model, but open source. The server side is just some PHP-code and a database (can be SQLite). Only think you need is a Let's Encrypt cert and a way to send emails for password reset/invite if needed. It is the right fit for our company. But if we didn't need the features syncthing would definitely be at the top of the list.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 17, 2020 14:10 UTC (Wed) by WhatsInAName (guest, #128037) [Link]

Syncthing rocks in a big way. Not only is it simple and to the point but, in addition, you are in full control of your data. Dropbox, iCloud, Google, etc. considered yourselves middle-fingered.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 17, 2020 17:58 UTC (Wed) by andrewsh (subscriber, #71043) [Link]

To everyone who uses or wants to use Syncthing and knows Python: the GTK UI for Syncthing needs your help: https://github.com/kozec/syncthing-gtk

The original author is no longer working on it, and it’s currently in Python 2 and needs a lot of work to be ported. You can help! I was planning to work on a fork, but haven’t yet found enough time.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 17, 2020 23:35 UTC (Wed) by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836) [Link] (6 responses)

This is very good. Wait until he hears about linux.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 18, 2020 20:27 UTC (Thu) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link] (5 responses)

Exactly what I thought when I read the last sentence:
" I would be a much happier person if at least half of the programs on my Mac/iPhone were like that."

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 18, 2020 23:16 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

And you could delete the other half? I really don't have a clue how much space is wasted on my phone by apps I'm NEVER going to use, but unfortunately can't delete ...

Cheers,
Wol

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 19, 2020 12:48 UTC (Fri) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link] (2 responses)

You can "delete" (Android parlance: disable, had that for years before Apple "innovated" it into some version of iOS) stock apps, but they will just keep lying there, dormant. At least they won't be nibbling your battery or have any application data nibble your storage, which is sorta good.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 19, 2020 15:23 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

That's nice when the vendor *lets* you disable the stock apps. In my experience the most problematic ones—i.e. the ones that somehow make money for the vendor either by driving users to their services or by collecting users' personal data—tend to have the "disable" button disabled.

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 20, 2020 18:34 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Except the application is still eating up your storage, and your phone may not have that storage to spare. I ended up in the catch-22 "can't upgrade apps until you update play-store, can't upgrade play-store until you delete your apps".

Cheers,
Wol

...deleting on Android

Posted Jun 20, 2020 20:21 UTC (Sat) by Herve5 (subscriber, #115399) [Link]

You can't because you want the latest, fastest, lightest phone on the market.
Otherwise you'd buy, for instance, something like a Fairphone (perfo being that from 2 years ago), with the /e/ operating system, which is Android without google apps (and direct access to F-Droid).
With that phone you can delete what you want, but in fact the bloatware isn't installed to begin with...
(disclaimer : I didn't go this way yet, but this is just because I already own a Fairphone from the previous generation -also GApps-free ;-)

Prokopov: Computers as I used to love them

Posted Jun 28, 2020 20:18 UTC (Sun) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

Currently a user of unison, I'm at times getting tempted by the real-time synchronization. At the same time I often get the feeling that this is something that would be great to have at the filesystem level with a bit more of the posix features. I've seen that there are orifs (http://ori.scs.stanford.edu/), ofs (http://offlinefs.sourceforge.net/wiki/) and probably others, but all of them appear to be stalled and never got traction. Does anybody have news on this front?