I recently did a switch from Cinnamon to Gnome - All seemed to go smoothly but then I realised dropbox wasn’t running and, if I tried running it, the whole DE would crash, restart (disabling extensions) and dropbox would still not run.
I’ve tried removing / renaming the config and cache files, then reinstalling and getting a default setup - No luck at all.
I’ve found numerous reports online, going back to GNOME 4.4 with issues reported with Dropbox and various Tray Icon extensions - Looking into this I’ve found that Dropbox will “run” with the Tray Icons extensions switched off but as soon as you try to run both it will just crash.
As using Dropbox without the tray menu is pretty much impossible I’m at a loss - I’ve tried to look for some kind of useful log info, but the Dropbox logs seem to be binary and not helpful.
Has anyone got any ideas where I can look for more info or has had this problem here, or can recommend a Tray Icon extension that will work?
I’ve had to uninstall it as it had started trying to download my entire 2TB dropbox to my laptop and I have no way to manage selective syncing
If you depend on applications that require a tray icon, choose a different DE. That might sound harsh, but Gnome removed tray icons and “extensions” can’t fix it.
However there is a python script, which can be used to control the Dropbox process on headless systems. It also allows to exclude directories from syncing.
It is not as user friendly, but if you want to stay with Gnome, you might want to try it.
You can download the script from Dropbox, read the last paragraph:
Well, I use Dropbox on Gnome, but I never found a tray icon extension that worked in all situations for me. All had bugs or weird issues and since I only need it for Dropbox, I dropped it completely.
This works for me, but I can understand why tray icons are important for some.
I’ve found a better option - I was using InSync already for my OneDrive cloud, so I already had a license for that - That seems to work fine with Dropbox, so I can still use the service without using the Dropbox client.
As a plus, I now have all my syncing in one place and Gnome doesn’t crash!
