Can Google Drive desktop be used on Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

You do not need to install software for that; instead, you only need to connect your account using GNOME Online Accounts. It's a sign-on framework for GNOME. It supports popular online services like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Nextcloud, etc; The tool comes pre-installed with Ubuntu, so you don’t have to worry about manual installation. However, if, for some reason, the app isn’t installed, then run the following command to install it quickly.

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install gnome-online-accounts

To add your Google Drive account, search for “Settings” in the GNOME menu; then:

Settings -> Online Accounts -> Add your google account.

In your file manager, you get your google drive mounted so you can store and retrieve data there.

As commented: this does not sync your file. You alter the contents on google drive itself so needs to be online.

If you want offline access you can add a tool like Insync (payware; multiple account support, desktop notification, symlink support), or Rclone (setup instructions; freeware; command-line to sync to Google Drive, but also Dropbox, Amazon S3, and OneDrive).

Solution 2:

No: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/7329379#zippy=%2Csystem-requirements shows that Google product is currently (Oct 2021) available for Windows and OSX only.

There are several other methods for accessing Google Drive, like Nautilus integration, and many of those work very well (I use one). Those are not Google products, but are independent projects that use Google's API for access. None offers the full range of features (like sync) that the Google product has, because some of those features are simply not available using the API

Solution 3:

For Google Drive, this is a good client: https://github.com/odeke-em/drive as well as https://github.com/prasmussen/gdrive

These clients sync your Google Drive data to your local system

Solution 4:

I use googledrive-ocamlfuse. It is tricky to setup, but works like the Windows version. That is, is doesn't sync, but streams.

It also supports shared drives.