Where's the Linux preferences GUI? The CLI doesn't work.

Whoa... they appear to have fixed this! Can anyone else confirm the settings window has been added back in?

Well you better prepare for that because there aren't enough Linux users for them to care about us. They aren't going to change their minds on this.

Well they need to reconsider that. This like a car company just deciding to remove steering wheels from their cars. It's not okay.

My plan renews in October. That gives them six months to fix this problem or they'll lose me as a customer, and I will make sure all the others I've recommended Dropbox to leave as well. This includes businesses. This is one of the most anti-usability moves I've seen a company do.

They aren't going to add it back. This is what I was told after my support representative said they contacted the engineering team.
"They've confirmed that they don't plan to roll back the UI changes. At this stage, I'm unable to provide a specific date for when they will be rolled out to users on the stable release. "

What Flame said. This is appalling to me. Why would you remove a critical feature that makes this product usable? When is this going to be put back? I need a timeline because that's what tells me whether or not I need to start hunting for and evaluating Dropbox alternatives. I really don't want to, but this is completely unacceptable.

I'm an Arch-based distro user as well and the change to having the CLI caught me off guard and absolutely ruined not only my day, but my next few months. I have an open escalated support ticket with support right now and all they really told me to do was go to the older version. I have responded by telling them that it is not a solution, just a temporary workaround that only pushes our anger to a slightly later date. I haven't paid thousands of dollars to Dropbox just to have core functionality ripped away from me. My organization manages currently about 70ish TBs of data in Dropbox with many thousands of files and folders that Selective Sync is used to manage. I told them that we are Dropbox users, not scripters, and this sort of change is trying to force us to be scripters. The amount of time lost by having to manage Selective Sync with CLI is immense. I expressed that it is literally cheaper for us to build the server infrastructure within our organization than it is to spend the person-hours using the CLI to manage Selective Sync. If they don't announce a re-adding of the GUI then we are implementing a short timeline that we have drafted to build the infrastructure and end our usage of Dropbox.

This is honestly why I created my forum account to figure this out. The fact this is going to be the next version just... why? It really doesn't make sense to completely degrade the user experience, especially since the whole point of using Dropbox was to get away from doing CLI stuff, and as the family IT person, no one in my household is exactly cheerful about this change.

As much as I could work on writing my own sub-GUI system for managing things, it shouldn't be needed. If I'm not mistaken, DropBox is still using Qt... which works on all platforms, so why can't anyone just compile for that? What sucks more about this change is I'm locked in on an annual subscription, and I JUST had my renewal done last month. As Windows 10's EOL approaches, I've made the switch to Linux in preparation for this, along with all my tools, and Dropbox's downgrade is going to remain in my mind for a while.

For me, having a solid native Linux client is one of the main reasons I use Dropbox over alternatives from Google and Microsoft.

The Linux client has always felt like an afterthought compared to the more feature-rich Windows and Mac versions, but that was acceptable because it still resembled the cleaner, more focused Dropbox experience from around 2010.

This new (still beta) change feels like you're degrading the Linux experience to little more than a headless CLI version, with only a minimal tray icon left as the sole GUI layer. At that point, there’s barely any distinction from cloud-agnostic CLI tools like `rclone`, and I seriously doubt you’ll retain many users after a downgrade like this.

The biggest UX downgrade, in my opinion, is managing Selective Sync. Commands like `dropbox exclude add foo bar` and `dropbox exclude remove baz qux` are clunky, and the double-negation logic of "exclude remove" is especially unintuitive.

Hi Flame Soulis -- Thanks for providing this context!

Based on your response and screenshots, it looks like you're using a non-standard setup for Dropbox on Linux.

You're missing the wrapper (dropbox) that actually implements the command line interface. This is a separate package named nautilus-dropbox that you can get here: https://github.com/dropbox/nautilus-dropbox

As we roll out the simplified preferences experience on Linux, you'll need this to ensure the Dropbox CLI works as expected!

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Ryan

Rich wrote:

Do you have Early Releases enabled in your account settings?

Absolutely nailed it! It was turned on, since I liked to check the next version out on Windows in the past. I had no idea it was an account setting.