It has been 3 years since my last post with release news for GVfs. This is mainly because previous releases were more or less just bug fixes. In contrast, GVfs 1.54 comes with two new backends. Let’s take a look at them.
OneDrive
One of the backends adds OneDrive support thanks to Jan-Michael Brummer. This requires setting up a Microsoft 365 account through the Online Accounts panel in the Settings application. Then the OneDrive share can be accessed from the sidebar of the Files application.
However, creating the account is a bit tricky now. You need to register on the Microsoft Entra portal to get a client ID. The specific steps can be found in the gnome-online-accounts#308 issue. Efforts are underway to register a client ID for GNOME, so this step will soon be unnecessary.
WS-Discovery
The other backend brings WS-Discovery support. It automatically discovers the shared SMB folders of the Windows devices available on your network. You can find them in the Other Locations view of the Files application. This has not worked since the NT1 protocol was deprecated. For more information on this topic, see my previous post.
You won’t find the Windows Network folder in the Other Locations view, all the discovered shares are directly listed in the Networks section now.
Finally, I would like to thank all the GVfs contributors. Let me know in the comments if you like the new backends. I hope the next releases will also bring some great news.
This great stuff, it has been a long winter of not being able to list windows shares in nautilus.
Off topic – but I was using the Google drive backend, and it made me wonder about search: Google drive (and probably onedrive) probably provide APIs for search, does nautilus use these, or does it have to enumerate all the remote folders when you search?
Yup, although Google Drive as well as OneDrive provides APIs for search, Nautilus enumerates all the remote directories currently.