If you’re used to accessing your Google Drive in the Nautilus file manager, a heads-up that the feature is no longer available in GNOME 50, which is the desktop version the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS uses.
While GNOME Online Accounts (GOA) integration continues to allow you to sign in to your Google account to enable supported apps to access your contacts, mail and calendar data securely, the toggle to give access to files is now gone.
It’s that toggle that allows you to remotely mount your Google Drive in Nautilus’ sidebar.
If you installed the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS beta you may still see a Files toggle in GOA > Google, but the feature itself won’t work. When you try to open your Google Drive in Nautilus, an “Unable to access…” account error will appear.
A set of package updates for GOA are rolling out to Ubuntu 26.04 development builds, and these disable the toggle from showing.
Why GNOME 50 dropped support (spoiler: security)
GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi has confirmed the feature is “no longer supported” on the GNOME Discourse forum, and explains why.
GNOME’s Google Drive access relies on libgdata, a library that acts as a communication bridge between GNOME apps and Google APIs.
But it’s had no active maintainer for nearly four years.
In December 2022, GNOME’s Michael Catanzaro posted a public call for volunteers to take over the maintenance of libgdata. In his call he warned that, if nobody did, integrations that rely on it may eventually stop working.
Nobody stepped up.
GVFS, the virtual filesystem layer that gives GNOME apps (like Nautilus) access to remote storage backends (like Google Drive), dropped its libgdata dependency last year because it’s “unmaintained and the only thing keeping libsoup2 in GNOME”.
And libsoup2? Also unmaintained – and full of security vulnerabilities.
Bassi did suggest those who wish to restore Google Drive functionality to GOA should reach out to the GVFS maintainer, but Catanzaro has indicated that that… might require a fork of libgdata.
“It’s been so long that libgdata is now archived”, he wrote in reply to Bassi’s suggestion, “so you cannot contribute even if you want to. Oh well”.
Still works in older versions of GNOME/Ubuntu
If you plan on upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it’s worth being aware of this change. With no native Google Drive app for Linux, this ‘native’ integration filled a gap. But there is currently no official replacement on the way.
The most straightforward alternative for now is rclone, which can mount Google Drive as a local filesystem. It’s available directly from the Ubuntu repositories, though it requires a one-time setup outside of GOA.
Google Drive integration continues to work on earlier versions of GNOME, including on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The removal only affects GNOME 50 and above.
Thanks GeekBeen12