Using Google Drive on Linux Mint

It’s 2023 and Google still has no Linux client for Google Drive. At this point, chances are they aren’t going to do it. But if you’re running Mint and Drive is part of your life, thankfully you have a few good options.

Connect Google Drive on Cinnamon

On Mint there a few different options for connecting to Google Drive. If you are only interested in connecting via the Gnome File Browser GUI from within Cinnamon, you can add Google Drive and other cloud storage services using the Online Accounts Feature. If you want filesystem access there are projects like like google-drive-ocamlfuse orgcsf, but are definitely designed for the more technical user.

ExpanDrive is a Google Drive client for Mint that has both filesystem-level mounted access through a fast network drive as well as a full featured ftp-style browser and uploader. It includes advanced features such as offline sync, background synchronization and many other powerful improvements over a standard network drive.

Mounting Google Drive on Mint

ExpanDrive has been available on Mac and Windows for over 10 years and has a few million users. ExpanDrive version 7 was released and added support for a wide variety of Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Red Hat, Linux Mint, CentOS, Debian and most other popular distributions.

ExpanDrive providers a variety of powerful features such as multi-threaded background uploads, a full graphical user interface to facilitate bulk transfer, integrated search and version management along with much more. The main product page goes into detail on many of these features.

It supports personal Google Drive accounts as well as GSuite Drive accounts, including support for Team Drives. It securely connects to the Google Drive API and transparently supports ADFS and 2FA.

Download ExpanDrive for Mint

Installation Instructions

Desktop based installations

ExpanDrive ships primarily as a desktop app with a user interface for advanced configuration and management. We also have a server edition that runs headless for Windows and Linux Servers.

Debian and Ubuntu based desktop distributions

For Debian and Ubuntu based distributions the easiest way to get started is to download and install the latest .deb package (64 bit), either through the graphical installer or via the command-line with the following command.

sudo apt install ./ExpanDrive_2023.4.1_amd64.deb

Installing the .deb will also automatically install the apt repository and code signing key to enable easy update using the system package manager.

You can install the repository and key manually with the following script

curl https://packages.expandrive.com/keys/expandrive.asc | gpg -- dearmor > packages.expandrive.gpg 
sudo install -o root -g root -m 644 packages.expandrive.gpg /usr/share/keyrings/ 
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/packages.expandrive.gpg] https://packages.expandrive.com/expandrive stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/expandrive.list'

Then you update the package cache and install ExpanDrive using:

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install expandrive

RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS based desktop distributions

Download our latest .rpm package (64-bit) and use yum to install ExpanDrive and the required dependencies.

sudo yum localinstall ./ExpanDrive-2023.4.1.x86_64.rpm

Installing the .rpm will also automatically configure the yum repository and code signing key to enable easy update using the system package manager.

You can install the yum repo manually using the following script:

sudo rpm -- import https://packages.expandrive.com/keys/expandrive.asc 
sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[expandrive] 
name=expandrive 
baseurl=https://packages.expandrive.com/rpm 
enabled=1 
gpgcheck=1 
gpgkey=https://packages.expandrive.com/keys/expandrive.asc" > /etc/yum.repos.d/expandrive.repo'

Then update your package cache and install Expandrive using dnf (Fedora 22 and above):

sudo dnf check-update 
sudo dnf install expandrive

or using yum

yum check-update 
sudo yum install expandrive

Server/Headless Edition

Head over to our ExpanDrive Server Edition page for instructions and packages for Windows and Linux servers. ExpanDrive Server edition is designed to run unattended, at boot [versus login], and provides drives that can even be re-shared on the network.

ExpanDrive connects your files as a fast network drive and accesses all of your data on demand. You can browse and open any file from within your file manager or from the command-line. ExpanDrive builds native access to Google Drive into Linux.