However, Microsoft today responded in a Hacker News thread that it fixed the issue on March 22 and it wasn't intentionally blocking Linux users. The implication seemed to be that Microsoft was doing some sort of browser sniffing, and perhaps it was intentionally thwarting OneDrive access by Linux users.

The forum participant, known as 'Torrenator,' changed Firefox's user-agent string to point to Windows, and it fixed the performance problems. That setup caused 'a lot of performance issues,' but not when Firefox was used on Windows 10 to access OneDrive.

In that case, the Firefox browser version 52 was used on the Linux Mint operating system to access OneDrive via an Office 365 subscription. The same sort of problem (and resolution) was described a couple of days ago in a Reddit forum. According to that post, the user forced 'a Windows user-agent' string on those browsers, which fixed the problem.

The problem was described in a November Microsoft forum post regarding OneDrive for Business running on Ubuntu Linux 16.04, using the Chrome or Firefox browsers.

Microsoft has fixed an issue that slowed access to OneDrive and OneDrive for Business for Linux users, but not for Windows users.

Microsoft onedrive for business client