Syncthing-Tray for Linux and Windows

[tomasz86 (Tomasz Wilczyński)]

@LeonCame

I hear the points you made. But for me, Syncthing is essentially aimed at an audience beyond the “consumer/hobbyist” stage and deserves to be better informed, and should not be forced to test 36 options for themselves.

Honestly, I’m not really sure about that. Of course, the majority of Syncthing’s users are likely more on the technical side, however this doesn’t mean that the average computer user shouldn’t have access to a fully free and open source solution to sync their files without relying on any proprietary cloud service, etc. The advantage of SyncTrayzor specifically is that they can just install and run it without any additional configuration.

@LeonCame

For me, a “gas factory” type utility that is almost 600MB is not recommended as it is! Neither for me, nor for my nephew, nor for my grandfather.

Yeah, SyncTrayzor does take a lot of space, but this is because it includes a full-blown Chromium browser that is used to display the actual Web GUI if you click on the tray icon. The other wrappers don’t offer this kind of functionality.

[LeonCame]

Since there is a bit of an audience here, I’ll also take this opportunity to say that nssm is also a very old solution, yet mentioned here: Run as a service independent of user log on and there : Starting Syncthing Automatically — Syncthing documentation

As a service under Windows it is recommended to use a more modern solution like this one: GitHub - winsw/winsw: A wrapper executable that can run any executable as a Windows service, in a permissive license.

Ask AI how to use it, you’ll see it’s disconcertingly easy!

But I guess someone will come along and explain to us that the old nssm that is part of the good old days is so much better. !?

[tomasz86 (Tomasz Wilczyński)]

The Docs page is a different story . It’s a bit of different use case though, as the new, non-tech-savvy user is supposed to just use one of the beginner-friendly wrappers/installers and leave all configuration to it, while the instructions in the Docs are intended for those who prefer to install Syncthing in a more “manual” way. It is true that many of them were written a long time ago and could possibly be outdated.

I myself updated the Task Scheduler instructions a few years ago, but when it comes to the running as a service, I haven’t really got any experience with that, so I cannot contribute there, and as far as I know, no-one else has touched them for a very long time.

[Martchus]

I have never made an effort of promoting Syncthing Tray on the website because I believe the best way to get started with Syncthing is with just Syncthing. That’s also why Syncthing Tray is designed to integrate with an existing setup rather than forcing its own way of setting things up onto the user - even if it leads to a less streamlined experience.

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

Maybe it would call for a slight reorg of the downloads page, but I think there would be space there for addons on top of a “basic” installation that improve quality of life in one way or the other. If someone wants to run with that…