On-demand files
Metadata is instant, content streams and caches on first open. "Always offline" pinning for selected folders. Behaviour, mount path and cache limits are configurable — see the documentation.
What Wusel does
Your Nextcloud as a folder at
Your Nextcloud as a folder at ~/Wusel.
Files are online-only by default and stream from Nextcloud the moment you open them. No full local mirror, no gigabytes of copies for files you don't need.
Distribution- and desktop-agnostic at the core: because Wusel is built on FUSE, the filesystem itself runs on every mainstream Linux distribution and under any desktop. Packages are published for Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian and Ubuntu — signed, on x86_64 and aarch64, with updates arriving through your own package manager. The desktop integration is GNOME-first because we run Fedora with GNOME internally; KDE support is on the roadmap, and for Cinnamon, XFCE, LXDE and others we welcome help with testing and builds.
Multiple Nextcloud accounts
Manage several instances side by side — handy for freelancers working with multiple clients, each running their own Nextcloud.
Native GNOME integration
A dedicated sidebar entry in Nautilus, status emblems right on the file, context-menu actions to pin or free space — right where you already work.
Desktop search
Your Nextcloud files show up in the GNOME Shell Activities overview and open straight from ~/Wusel — no separate browser tab, no second search.
On servers, not just desktops
A real mount on a headless machine, for the disk cost of the files something actually opens — an account far larger than the server's disk is simply not a problem. Re-export it over Samba, point a backup job at it, let a script drop reports where colleagues can see them.
Concurrent by design
Reads, uploads and listings run in parallel — a large transfer never blocks an unrelated ls, and saving a file returns as soon as the change is safe on disk while the upload continues behind it.
Runs in the background
No tray, no browser: Wusel runs as a systemd user service, sends desktop notifications when something happens, and stores credentials in the OS keyring.
Get started
Install & connect.
Packages are published as a signed repository for Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian and Ubuntu — add it once, and every release from then on arrives with the rest of your system updates.
Fedora
Add the repository, then install:
sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=\
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/\
home:/cdhermann:/wusel/Fedora_44/home:cdhermann:wusel.repo
sudo dnf install wuselopenSUSE Tumbleweed
Add the repository, then install:
sudo zypper addrepo \
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/\
home:/cdhermann:/wusel/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:cdhermann:wusel.repo
sudo zypper install wuselDebian & Ubuntu
Debian 13 and Ubuntu 26.04, signed and updated through apt. The repository line and the signing key are three commands — they are on the install page:
sudo apt install wuselArch & everything else
Arch builds from the PKGBUILD in the repository. For any other distribution, each release also carries single RPM and .deb files, and building from source needs nothing but Rust. Missing a package for your distribution? We are happy to help — and just as happy to accept help.
Why we built Wusel.
The official Nextcloud client does not support virtual files on Linux — you only get full local sync. Mounting the WebDAV URL directly is the common alternative — and quickly turns out to be painfully slow. We wanted neither. Wusel is our answer: cache-first, natively integrated into the file manager's vocabulary, open source.