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Forum Discussion

rust's avatar
rust
New member | Level 2
7 years ago

Cannot stop Dropbox starting on system startup

In Linux Mint I have previously been able to disable Dropbox starting on system startup but now it actively fights this.

 

I can deselect Dropbox in Control Centre > Startup Applications. Then it won't start on system startup but as soon as I manually run Dropbox it immediately reactivates the Dropbox setting in Control Centre > Startup Applications.

 

The tick box in Dropbox's Preferences has no effect. This tick box has been inactive for some time (many months) but I have ignored this in the past as I could control startup action in Control Centre. It seems a recent update to Dropbox has changed the startup selection logic. I'm guessing but I suspect this is because of some developer work following the recent Ubuntu 18.04. Perhaps the developers don't know that their preferences tick box hasn't worked for a long time?

  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    7 years ago
    Thanks for the update, could you try installing the beta version of the app using the link on this page.
     
    The changelog includes the following:
     
    - Fix a bug on Linux where the "Start Dropbox on system startup" setting was not persisted
     
    This most likely is related to your issue, so hopefully it should resolve it. Otherwise, please let me know!
  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
    Hi there, as we don’t officially support the Mint distro, we can only really provided limited support on this matter.
     
    I assume that you’ve already tried an advanced reinstall on your machine?
    • Russell G.1's avatar
      Russell G.1
      Explorer | Level 4

      I appreciate you don't support Mint although it's a derivative of Ubuntu. Dropbox works nicely in Mint, I've used it for a few years. Maybe the part I am complaining about is Mint specific.

       

      I just did an advanced reinstall although some of the files mentioned are not in the Mint version i.e. nautilus-dropbox,  /var/lib/dropbox, /etc/apt/source.d/dropbox. There was no change in this behaviour.

       

      There's an article I found here which has a hack workaround in the answer, basically stopping Dropbox from re-writing the startup file by changing permissions to make it unwritable

      https://askubuntu.com/questions/1039986/unable-to-disable-dropboxs-autostart-in-ubuntu-18-04

       

      Note that this user is running your supported version Ubuntu 18.04 (which is the distro my Mint 19 is based on). So you may get this reported sometime soon by a Ubuntu user, although many of them won't notice or care about it automatically starting at boot. So I guess whether you follow this up will be down to how keen you are to debug minor Ubuntu issues.

      • Jay's avatar
        Jay
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
        Thanks for the update, could you try installing the beta version of the app using the link on this page.
         
        The changelog includes the following:
         
        - Fix a bug on Linux where the "Start Dropbox on system startup" setting was not persisted
         
        This most likely is related to your issue, so hopefully it should resolve it. Otherwise, please let me know!

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