This was my experience as well. I had to destroy my personal account once I left the company because they couldn't unmerge them and transfer to a new account. This was like 3 months ago and I was shocked that they still didn't have this fixed.
Now we use Google Drive and it just works, figures out accounts, has great permissions stuff for teams, etc.
There's still no official google drive client you can install on linux. WHich is bizarre, considering chromebooks run linux and obviously sync with drive.
Google has a history of acknowledging the existence of consumers on Linux, and has published Linux binaries for various closed source products in the past. I am writing this comment to you at this moment using one such piece of software.
Does Apple have a history of publishing applications built for non-Apple BSDs?
Well, Apple gave us CUPS. Plus, recently they announced Swift will be supported on Linux, too. Now I'd be really happy if they also ported iTunes to Linux (I'm currently forced to run the Windows version in VirtualBox) - or at least make their iOS devices more Linux-friendly. IMHO there is hope.
CUPS was first released in 1999 and was adopted by most Linux distros soon after. Apple first adopted CUPS in 2003. It wasn't until 2007 before they bought the rights to the source code, hired the main developer and took over the development.
It's not a linux kernel issue, it's a distribution "no bundled libraries" and packaging issue. Google doesn't want to maintain dozens of binaries (and their respective packages) in order to support dozens of distributions. It may be that containers can sorta solve this, a single container that can run on any distro that has container support. But this is still not anywhere as straight forward as say OS X where DropBox (like many other applications) are simply drag and drop into /Applications to install, or uninstall.
Probably a mix of that and the fact that Drive supports a hybrid of traditional folders and tagging that you can't ignore (it would break things) and you can't cleanly implement on Linux (there's no real reliable mechanism to support tags that works on XFS, ext4, and Btrfs, which seems like the bare minimum today you'd need to cover).
One thing I've been waiting for is the possibility of using both private and company Google Drive at the same time, but at least according to faq this is not yet supported:
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2405894?hl=en
Now we use Google Drive and it just works, figures out accounts, has great permissions stuff for teams, etc.