Google Integration in Online Accounts
Anyone missing Google Drive integration with KDE Plasma can stop — it’s here!
Detailed in a blog post this week, the KDE Google Drive integration is super similar to that of GNOME Online Accounts, which we’ve written about before.
Users are able to add their Google account credentials to a centralised ‘Online Accounts’ panel and then permit other apps access to features provided through it, like Google Drive.
Once hooked up users can access, open, edit and add Google Drive files using Dolphin, the default Plasma file manager, as well as the Plasma Folder View applet, and (presumably) other supported apps — but only while online.
Like the various GNOME remote mounts this integration is not a local sync/back-up solution a la Dropbox. Users can open remote Google Drive files in local apps, and save changes back to the cloud, but for an offline copy a literal copy will need to be made.
After a Google account is successfully added to the KDE version of online accounts a helpful notification toast is shown. Clicking on this will open the Dolphin file manager using the gdrive:// URL of the added account.
Plasma users wanting to try the Google Drive integration out for themselves can do so, but only provided they have both kaccounts-provider 17.04 and kio-gdrive 1.2 installed. The developer edition of KDE Neon has both of these packages in its archives (Kubuntu does not) but kio-gdrive is out of date. Kio-gdrive 1.2 is currently in beta and has to be manually installed.