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Forum Discussion
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
Dropbox Staff
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
