Dropbox unsupported desktop environment popup on Wayland + Sway

Support AUR
1

I just started getting this popup from Dropbox on Wayland + Sway (with lots of gtk apps). Prior to this, the Dropbox app indicator icon was working fine in waybar.

The linked Dropbox doc page from the popup’s Learn more button talks about checking XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP for a very limited set of “supported” desktops (e.g. Unity, KDE Plasma, GNOME, XFCE, MATE). For my Wayland + Sway machine it’s set to: XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway

Currently I have installed:

  • aur/dropbox 235.4.5905-1
  • extra/libayatana-appindicator 0.5.94-1
  • extra/libappindicator 12.10.1-1

Is there anything else that is now required? Maybe Dropbox app developers are unaware that their app worked fine previously on Wayland + Sway without many extra packages?

2

I cannot say anything about their motivation - but if I am to guess - it is to prevent having to troubleshoot issues which may occur when using e.g. sway.

Many popular applications’ official support may be limited to the most dominant distributions e.g. Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora and Suse Linux.

For the developers it is often hard and difficult to keep up with the rapid changes within niche systems based on rolling releases and rare setups like using sway or i3.

You may be able to work around it - if you add an environment variable to your launcher’s command line e.g.

Exec=XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=xfce <binary>