Cannot stop Dropbox starting on system startup

[rust]

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]

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]

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 · Accepted solution]

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!

[Russell G.1]

Hi. I installed beta 53.3.65  and it solves the startup selection problem in Mint 19, thanks. Thanks to the developers for fixing this.

[Russell G.1]

By the way will the beta automatically upgrade later to the next stable or should I manually replace it with the next stable version?

[Jay]

Glad to hear it’s working now! 

Generally updates in the beta make their way to the stable version, unless there were further issues or more testing needed. 

It should automatically upgrade to the stable version the next time, however to be certain of this, when the next version is installed on your machine, uncheck the box next to "Early releases” here, and then redownload the installer again from here.

Have a great Wednesday!

[Jay]

Just an update, the stable version is out now with the fix itself, so you can already follow my previous steps to get back onto the stable build flow.