Like OneDrive for Windows or iCloud on MacOS. So files only her downloaded when needed and you can specify directories/files to be available offline.
Needs to integrate into nautilus context menu with the option to get a shareable link through that. Though I’m open to switching my file manager. Nextcloud can do it but the feature is experimental and every time I restart it just syncs everything again.
Gnome online accounts doesn’t let you specify folders to be available offline. Onedriver is the same and I’d like to stop paying MS money. Plus neither integrate into nautilus’ context menu.
It’s the one thing I really miss from win 11. Basically all folders I worked were synced and for a secondary backup I synced OneDrive to a NAS. My Cloud Storage is bigger than the available space on my machine. I could do insync with selective sync, it nautilus integration as well. But that’s just not as elegant as smart/on demand sync, having everything available in your file manager when you need it.
Seafile has an sshfs style client for windows, mac and Linux. Rather than a traditional folder sync like Dropbox (which seafile also has), seadrive mounts a remote connection to your library that you can browse in your file explorer. I’ve only used the windows version, it has little cloud icons that show the files are not local and then you can right click a folder of file and “make available locally” to have offline access. This sounds exactly like that you are looking for. Full gui access to all files with no local storage needed unless you want.
I haven’t tried seadrive on Linux but they have the option on their site. I use the standard seafile-client on Linux and choose only certain libraries to use with no issues. On windows the seadrive is quite impressive in regard to how well it works.
https://help.seafile.com/drive_client/drive_client_for_linux/