This is dumb, because XFS is the default for RHEL/OpenSUSE
I'm a Debian kinda person, but I know that RHEL uses XFS as its default filesystem for recent versions - so this seems like a fairly dumb move. And OpenSUSE seems to use XFS for /home in recent versions.
They should at least support both ext4 and XFS on that basis alone.
The xattrs reason is plainly not true, as there's a bunch of filesystems that support xattrs perfectly well. One interesting comment I saw on Reddit seems to have a possible answer:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/966xt0/linux_dropbox_client_will_stop_syncing_on_any/e3yx2gs/
Basically Dropbox may have used a particular attribute as an identifier. That attribute is static on ext4, but may change on XFS. If that's the case then this is nothing to do with xattrs, and everything to do with a bad assumption on the part of Dropbox's development team. (I'm guessing they use it to determine whether a file is the same but changed versus a completely new file which replaced the old one.) They assumed all filesystems would behave like ext4, and now they're finding that this isn't the case and there are some edge cases they didn't expect.
If this is the case then rather than fix the problem they created, they've decided just to shift the blame and drop customers who they failed...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
