Hello, fellow travelers! 
Disclosure: This is a project announcement from the PDrive maintainers. PDrive is free and open source; there is no paid offering or affiliate link.
We wanted Proton Drive on Linux to feel like a natural part of the desktop instead of a mount that has to be babysat — while staying honest about its experimental foundations.
That became PDrive: an independent, GPL-3.0 community project built around one carefully managed rclone process.
PDrive is not a general-purpose rclone GUI. It focuses on one particularly tricky integration: a writable Proton Drive mount at /pdrive, with a native GTK control center and conservative guardrails around transfers, authentication, VFS cache and recovery.
What it brings to the desktop
- Native file-manager access through
/pdrive, including a GTK bookmark - Live upload and download graphs, active transfers, queue state and estimated time remaining
- A clear distinction between Proton cloud capacity, local disk space and the protected VFS cache
- Independent upload and download limits for bulk file data, without throttling metadata requests
- Guided connection tuning, transfer-slot and cache-retention controls
- Encrypted rclone configuration through GNOME Keyring, optional 2FA, contextual reauthorization and guarded account switching
- English and German UI, tray integration, desktop notifications and locally installed documentation
The principle behind it
PDrive should never make a status display look healthy at the expense of user data.
A quiet or long-running transfer is not automatically treated as stalled. Dirty cache data survives ordinary recovery. Reaching 100% payload progress is treated as finalization, not proof of remote success. Fresh-2FA requests and concrete login rate limits become explicit, actionable states instead of uncontrolled retry loops.
Where it stands today
The latest PDrive Release supports Linux Mint 22.x with Cinnamon as its reference platform. An Arch Linux package candidate is available for configured real-world review, and Ubuntu portability is in progress. Until a package-manager channel exists, the documented source installer is the supported path.
PDrive is not an official Proton product, and rclone currently labels its Proton Drive backend as beta. Important data should always have an independent backup.
- Project and screenshots
- Quick start
- PDrive support and bug reports
- Backend coordination and our stewardship offer
For PDrive support and bug reports, please use GitHub Issues. This forum topic is for rclone-community discussion and project updates rather than third-party support.
We would love broader feedback from Proton Drive users and rclone maintainers — especially real-world failure modes, the Linux workflows that matter most, and help testing the next distribution targets.
Built with a great deal of care, and very happy to finally share it here. 