Dropbox on Fedora Silverblue 39

Question

I'm testing Fedora Silverblue 39 currently, and the Dropbox experience is not great.

I installed the latest version of Dropbox from Flathub, launched it and signed in without issues.

But as soon as I closed the settings, I couldn't reopen anything. Relaunching the app just open the folder in Files.

I tried installing the AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Gnome shell extension, but after launching Dropbox it crashed with an error `Util.DBusProxy is undefined`

Looking forward to being able to use dropbox on the latest Silverblue!

IanWood · Answer

I used the default Linux instructions on my Fedora Kinoite installation. Works fine.

JohnStarich · Answer

I agree, the experience on Fedora Silverblue or other Atomic Desktops isn't great right now. The flatpak I've tried appears to be unverified, probably maintained by Flathub itself. An official flatpak would go a long way to making this a great experience.

For now, it appears layering the official rpm package is the only way to install from a trusted source. This may work well for other distros, but on Atomic Desktops, the install time is long and requires a system restart.

Please consider publishing a verified package to Flathub or similar!

lobau · Answer

Unfortunately, Fedora Silverblue is an immutable operating system, which means it doesn't come with the usual dnf, apt, etc.

It's has plenty of merits on its own in term of security and upgradability, but one of the main drawback is that everything needs to be running in a flatpak style sandbox. Flatpak is the intended mean for a user to install apps on their system.

I understand that the flatpak is not an official solution for us Silverblue users, but I know people would be very happy to be able to use their Dropbox out of the box when it releases.