Installing Dropbox - newbie experience

Hi!

Being new to Manjaro I tried 3 ways to install Dropbox:

  1. Pamac GUI (Add/remove software in menu). This gave a working menu icon in my start menu which logged me in to Dropbox. However, no syncing took place and I was unable to change storage settings via the Dropbox tray icon.

  2. Dropbox headless install as per instructions at the Dropbox site: Install - Dropbox which was working but gave me no menu item and a constantly running script in terminal. Terminating the script also terminated Dropbox.

  3. Removed everything (this was helpful: How to uninstall Dropbox on your computer | Dropbox Help ) and did a new search in these forums: Dropbox not working (New Linux User) - #2 by chomsky gave the recipe: pamac build dropbox worked like a charm!

In the end I have one advice: trust the terminal!

And one qustion: When pamac terminal works, why didn’t pamac gui? I guess it ran the command pamac install dropbox instead, but shouldn’t there be a graphical way to have it choose between ‘install’ and ‘build’ - or automatically determine what is needed?

Also, I guess I could file a bug regarding list item 1 and pamac gui failing at its job. What would be the proper place for that?

The install parameter is used when you want to install a package from manjaro repos. build is used when you want to install a package from AUR. As dropbox is available in the AUR, one has to use the build option when using pamac cli. In short pamac install is only for repo packages and pamac build is how you build from AUR.

Search here for your issue - Dropbox - ArchWiki

or report here - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dropbox

Thanks for those pointers!

…but you directed me to AUR regarding dropbox.

My gut feeling here is the problem resides with pamac’s GUI frontend, since installing from there failed while installing with CLI succeded. Where would I report errors with pamac gui?

I don’t think that can happen. The gui and cli both do the same thing in background.

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