Yeah this is so annoying.. I hate the focus they have, has me thinking of also not throwing all eggs in one basket with these services..
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Proton
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Empowering you to choose a better internet where privacy is the default. Protect yourself online with Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive. Proton Pass and SimpleLogin.
Proton Mail is the world's largest secure email provider. Swiss, end-to-end encrypted, private, and free.
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Proton Calendar is the world's first end-to-end encrypted calendar that allows you to keep your life private.
Proton Drive is a free end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that allows you to securely backup and share your files. It's open source, publicly audited, and Swiss-based.
Proton Pass Proton Pass is a free and open-source password manager which brings a higher level of security with rigorous end-to-end encryption of all data (including usernames, URLs, notes, and more) and email alias support.
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Come on guys give them a break. You dont have to use their services if you dont want, but they do a variety of things and they do them well. You can still use Drive through a browser.
But their whole sales pitch is the privacy community. Of course if you care about privacy you will be using Linux and not Windows or MacOS.
Proton is super easy to use. They are a gateway drug into privacy. Its close enough to google for any pleb to use. If you are using linux, then you probably dont need to be airplane spoon feed privacy.
That's exactly the problem. They do a lot of things and every single one of them is missing features.
Using a Web browser when you have thousands fo files needing to be synced is a terrible experience..
Also a synology client is missing. They should just provide a public API. Then we could build the clients by ourself instead of waiting for years.
You can try rclone but given the Proton Drive backen is in beta, it's probably not going to be a simple setup.
Thank you for the link. I might try it one day, but my skills are still very basic.
I've been testing out the rclone Proton Drive integration for a bit. As it is today, the rclone approach is currently too slow, especially using the "mount" approach which lets you access Drive files on-the-fly only downloading data as needed.
Using an "sync" approach (where data is stored both locally and in Drive) might be a better approach, unless you expect rapid syncing of files.
Considering the setup efforts, I cannot recommend Proton Drive for Linux in a productivity context.
Alternatives to Proton Drive on Linux there is @filen and Tresorit, which are both fully #e2ee. I've been using both for a while and both are decent.
Filen is the cheapest alternative and feature wise pretty close to Proton Drive - but they have a sync client for Linux. They do not have a possibility to access files "on-the-fly"; all data must be synced locally. And sharing data via URL need to happen via the web portal. Sharing data between Filen users was read-only access last time I checked.
Tresorit is fairly expensive, but also a lot more feature rich, especially on the sharing side. The Linux client supports both synchronising files between local storage and the cloud as well as a "drive mount" where all files in the cloud are available and only downloaded once you access it - or uploaded directly if you store something there.
Both Filen and Tresorit are fairly efficient in regards to uploading and downloading data via their sync clients. Using the web portal is slower, especially on larger files. This is naturally and not unexpected; the data is decrypted first on your device when the data has been downloaded from the cloud storage. Proton Drive is no different here.
Filen is a more properly open source based product. Tresorit is non-open source and built on top of Microsoft Azure services.
I'm not familiar with Proton drive but with Google drive you can use a vfs cache if I'm not mistaken to make things faster.
@8rhn6t6s There are some caching which need to be enabled with the protondrive rclone mounting. But it is still slow.
Remember that non-E2EE storages (such as Google Drive, AWS/S3, etc) can do the upload a lot faster as a starting point, as there is no client-side encryption of the data being uploaded (and the reverse; decrypting downloaded data). This decryption/encryption happens in the protondrive "module" in rclone. On top of that comes that files are split up into "chunks" which are transferred via separate HTTP calls. And I have no idea (aka "have not read the code) how the unlock key of the PGP key is handled in rclone. All of these things combined together impacts the performance.
That said, I've had a quick test on a Windows computer with Proton Drive installed. It wasn't blazingly fast there as well, but still felt faster than rclone.
My guess is that it's partly that the rclone implementation has room for improvements on how the Proton Drive server-side APIs are called and some of it is related to crypto implementation performance.
For example, I dunno if the Proton Drive APIs support HTTP/2 protocol or QUIC ... And I dunno if the rclone supports them as well. Just in this aspect there are lots of room to cut down on the "connection handshake" as HTTP/2 and QUIC supports more efficient handshakes and can also have multiple streams sending data in parallel - using a single handshake. If the native Proton Drive app on Windows implements this, that may explain some of the performance differences.
Thank you for taking the time to type all this, much appreciated! I will look into Filen and Tresorit.
Very disappointed as well, a Proton Drive for Linux is a must. Waiting this for years!
See the edit in my post, they finally revealed the reason
When it's.like this, I don't use or pay for their services.
While i understand the sentiment, that would make things even more difficult to ever happen, because they would be lacking funds. Yes, i feel proton is very pricey. However, they are a company i still really trust; they have the services that are very important for me; and i consider my being a paid consumer partly as a donation, to support and encourage them.
How easy would it be in theory to just fork it on github and make Linux client?
@_Atlas_)@lemmy.world @Papanca
To fork what? The Windows or macOS Proton Drive and create a Linux version?
I would expect GUI interface is the least of the problems; that's most likely Qt based across all platforms.
One step up in the difficulty level is to implement the file synchronisation right. This would most likely need to be based on macOS, as that has a file system which shares more features to most Linux file systems. However, Linux supports many file systems and there are lots of corner cases to watch out for here (extended attributes). A synchronisation should ideally also synchronise all the meta-data about files, to ensure this is restored correctly on a different host later on.
And the most difficult and most different aspect is the "access on-demand". Here files are only downloaded from Drive as they are accessed. It's like a remote file system mounted locally. From the user experience, it looks like an "external harddrive", but it accesses data stored remotely. There are many ways to do this; an own kernel module or FUSE are the most common ways. FUSE is "simplest" and quite common - but might not give the best performance in many cases. A dedicated kernel module is tricky to distribute as they are hard-bound to the running kernel version. When you multiply those efforts to the Linux distributions available and the various kernel versions each distribution ships - it gets hard to get right. DKMS based distribution is more likely the best approach, but even that has challenges (Secure Boot system requires setting up signing keys, etc).
The difficult part is most likely not the UI aspect, but the "low level" code actually doing the file synchronisation and remote file access. That is very different between each platform.
Well pitter patter.
What's more disappointing now than ever is that Protonmail for Android still depends on Play Services/FCM for push notifications.
Recent news should be their cue to do something about that, and if they don't... Idk, sour taste and all that
Notifications are still encrypted, so no issues there about privacy. Convenience? Sure thing. BTW, I really want a notification service away from Google.
Even if the contents aren't sent over Google servers in the first place, there's still information left about when the app receives a notifcation.
This kind of metadata is already quite useful for profiling purposes, since it creates a clear trail to follow.
Sure, and that's why a new method is planned.
WINE