In my case my partner has a Windows 10 surface laptop. It’s perfectly functional and does what she needs it to do, but Windows 10 is dying next year, so I need to find some solution that is user friendly (meaning GUI-based in this case) to maintain her access to her OneDrive, or we throw away a perfectly good laptop to buy a slightly newer one. Besides the e-waste it’s just a waste of money. It makes some business sense, why make it easy to move away from windows? Except it also sucks on anything that isn’t a windows desktop, so they just expect people to put up with a subpar service essentially because their business users don’t have much choice. Dropbox was better 10 years ago than OneDrive is now, in terms of platform availability and usability.
Note: I’m aware we can access OneDrive and office via a browser, however it’s not the same as native and feels clunky. Throwing Linux on it and using a browser is probably going to be our solution if I can’t get rclone to work in a way she’ll be happy with.
I think both KDE and GNOME desktop environments might have integration with OneDrive as an option in their respective file browsers.
I remember KDE could work with Google Drive in that casual “download when you need it” way, rather than the traditional “sync mirrored copies” way.
Personally I’d say KDE is also a fantastic desktop environment for coming from Windows with little friction. I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed personally, but Fedora has a KDE “spin” and I think Zorin uses it by default.
In my case my partner has a Windows 10 surface laptop. It’s perfectly functional and does what she needs it to do, but Windows 10 is dying next year, so I need to find some solution that is user friendly (meaning GUI-based in this case) to maintain her access to her OneDrive, or we throw away a perfectly good laptop to buy a slightly newer one. Besides the e-waste it’s just a waste of money. It makes some business sense, why make it easy to move away from windows? Except it also sucks on anything that isn’t a windows desktop, so they just expect people to put up with a subpar service essentially because their business users don’t have much choice. Dropbox was better 10 years ago than OneDrive is now, in terms of platform availability and usability.
Note: I’m aware we can access OneDrive and office via a browser, however it’s not the same as native and feels clunky. Throwing Linux on it and using a browser is probably going to be our solution if I can’t get rclone to work in a way she’ll be happy with.
There was quite a bit of initial config to do, but there is Linux OneDrive Client, and OneDriveGUI
Might also look into https://github.com/jstaf/onedriver !
I think both KDE and GNOME desktop environments might have integration with OneDrive as an option in their respective file browsers.
I remember KDE could work with Google Drive in that casual “download when you need it” way, rather than the traditional “sync mirrored copies” way.
Personally I’d say KDE is also a fantastic desktop environment for coming from Windows with little friction. I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed personally, but Fedora has a KDE “spin” and I think Zorin uses it by default.
Hope this is helpful :)
If you’re going to try Linux, there’s obviously a ton of great options but I can definitely recommend ZorinOS for anyone unfamiliar with Linux.
I replaced Windows on my Mom’s computer with Zorin and she absolutely loves it. Its UI is simple and clean and the OS just works.