Now that Gnome 42 has been released and available in most Linux distributions, I started experiencing problems with the Dropbox icon in the system tray.

First of all, I have no problem with Ubuntu 22.04, which comes with the extension “AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support” https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/. Moreover, I think the problem is not there because, while Ubuntu 22.04 ships Gnome 42, it still ships Nautilus in version 41.

In Fedora and EndeavourOS, I usually install the same extension in the Gnome DE, and it has been working quite well.

Unfortunately, with Gnome 42 (provided by Fedora 36 and currently by EndeavourOS), I started experiencing problems, even with the extension above installed and activated.

If you had already installed Dropbox in your Gnome 41 DE and upgraded to Gnome 42 (e.g., you upgraded Fedora 35 to Fedora 36 after installing Dropbox), the icon is clickable. Still, you get a context menu always saying “Connecting…”

At least you can access “Preferences…”.

However, suppose you had never installed Dropbox in that Gnome 42 environment. In that case, the icon in the system tray appears (again, after installing the above extension), but no matter how you click on that, no context menu appears at all. That’s a disgrace because you cannot access Dropbox preferences, like “selective sync” (you have to use the command line, as I suggested in the previous post).

Instead of the extension “AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support” (disable it if you had already activated that), you can use the extension “Tray Icons: Reloaded,” https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/. Install it, activate it, logout and login, and now the context menu works as expected:

Remember that this extension does not seem to support all system tray icons. For example, Variety does not seem to be supported.

At least you can use this extension to set up Dropbox (e.g., selective sync) and then go back to the previous extension!