How to install Synology Desktop Utilities on non-Debian Linux Systems

For Linux Desktop users with a Synology NAS, it is nice to use their Deskop Tooling. Unfortunately, Synology abandoned Support for .rpm based systems and only supports Debian's .deb format. Now these tools are not a must-use. Note Station can be used via the web front end and syncing could be done with any native Linux solution that you like. But if you want the ease of their tools, here is a possible solution.

UPDATE: since the Synology Drive Client is available via Flathub, I added this as the easiest option.

I have done this on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but this should work on any other .rpm based system.

1. The easiest way: Synology Drive Client from Flathub

On a KDE Plasma system like Tumbleweed or Manjaro, open Discover and add Flathub to your sources:

Search for Synology and install Synology Drive

As Flakpaks have limited system access by design, you need to configure Synology Drive to have file system access. The easiest way to do this is via another Flatpak app, search for Flatseal and install it.

Open Flatseal, select Synolgy Drive and grant it access to all directories you want to sync 

Start Synology Drive and use it as usual

This solution has a drawback at least on my installation on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE: it only runs with X11, not with Plasma. If this happens to you, try the next solution.

2. The (somewhat) easy way: Synology Drive Client

If you can not or don't want to use Flakpaks, then try this solution:

Alien is your friend, so get any of the alien packages from software.opensuse.org, download the .deb version of Synology Drive Client, use alien on it and just install the newly created .rpm (in my case synology-drive-7.0.2-12683.x86_64.rpm).

The tricky part was to get alien up and running. Alien requires rpm-build, which requires the patch utility. Tumbleweed comes with an older version of patch that comes with mingw, but rpm-build requires a newer one. So uninstall patch and install Gnu patch, then install rpm-build, then alien.

sudo alien -r synology-drive-client-12682.x86_64.deb
sudo zypper in synology-drive-7.0.2-12683.x86_64.rpm

Install it with zypper and you are done, this should also run on KDE Plasma.

Everything works, it also starts automatically on login.

3. The hard way: Synology Note Station Client

Ideally, the above way should work with any of the Synology Tools. But doing so completely messed up my KDE Plasma environment. Right after the zypper install command, my did not react to any input anymore. After restart, I did not boot to the login screen, but was stuck on a dark grey screen with a mouse pointer. Instead of repairing, I quickly reinstalled Tumbleweed and tried it again. Same problem again, I can reproduce this at will. I did not had the time to fix this, so I reinstalled Tumbleweed again. Here is the workaround that I used:

sudo alien -g synology-note-station-client-2.2.1-553-linux-x64.deb

Again, use alien, but this time use the -g option to just unpack the .rpm to a directory structure.

This gives you a directory structure, that just needs to be copied to the corresponding directories ...

cd synology-drive-client-12682.x86_64
sudo cp -R * /

and that's it.

That works fine, I haven't had any issues until now.