Cinnamon: In Startup Applications, the startup delay is reset to 0

[jaimemrjm]

In _Startup Applications_, the startup delay is reset to 0 after you edit a Startup Program with a delay and session is restarted. See #4396.

Checked with cinnamon-control-center 2.6.0

[JosephMcc]

I just tested this on Cinnamon 2.8.4 and couldn't reproduce this. Would you mind retrying this after you update?

[mtwebster]

What program are you trying to change this on? I've noticed some programs undo any changes you make here. I think dropbox does, for instance.

[JosephMcc]

@mtwebster yeah, it seems dropbox always changes this back to 0. Other things I tried like mintUpdate, Indicator-LockKeys, mintWelcome all seem fine.

The dropbox icon in the systray does seem to work fine in 2.8 without the delay though.

[jaimemrjm]

Yes, the application I want to delay is Dropbox. I will try with 2.8 from testing repo in Arch Linux.

[jaimemrjm]

The issue is solved with Cinnamon 2.8. I can delay the dropbox start to show the icon in the systray now.

[RohanSJ]

Actually, this issue is not solved. You may now see the Dropbox icon but if you check Startup Applications after booting I expect that you will see that Dropbox has still reset the the startup delay to 0. So why are you now able to see the Dropbox icon? Some change in your other software (like an upgrade to Cinnamon 2.8) can cause the Dropbox icon to either start appearing (your case) or stop appearing (my case, and I'm on Cinnamon 2.8 too). There may be some kind of race condition going on.

[Piiit]

@JosephMcc This issue still exists with Cinnamon 3.0.7. It works around 50% of the time, I guess that the race-condition explained by @RohanSJ still exists. Please reopen it.

Dropbox and maybe also other applications have an option to set the "start on login" parameter (link?, configfile?), but I guess that it does not set the delay option (which is, I think, Cinnamon-specific and not standard).

A solution could be to store Cinnamon-specific parameters separately, and copy them back into an overwritten autostart config file.

[Odyseus]

Hello, everybody.

I don't thing that this is a problem with Cinnamon. The problem is Dropbox that changes the ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop file every time Dropbox is started with the option Start Dropbox on system startup. If that option is unchecked, the ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop file is removed. In short, you may never be able to customize that file while that option is checked.

One way of working around this annoyance is to just uncheck the Start Dropbox on system startup option on Dropbox preferences and create a new startup entry like this:

This also happens on KDE. To fix the problem of the systray icon for Dropbox disappearing, I wanted to change the Exec line on the .desktop file (by adding dbus-launch to the command). But every time Dropbox started, it changed the ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop.

[mainmachine]

So this is a problem with Dropbox, basically?

Looks like lazy programming - they're just recreating dropbox.desktop on launch every time...?

[Odyseus]

Hello, @mainmachine.

So this is a problem with Dropbox, basically?

I only observed this behaviour with Dropbox. Maybe other applications with options to start at startup do the same. I don't really know.

they're just recreating dropbox.desktop on launch every time...?

That's right. And it's easily reproducible.

• Just check the option Start Dropbox on system startup on Dropbox preferences and close Dropbox.
• Now open with a text editor the ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop file and do any edits to it and save.
• Start Dropbox and see how all the changes to the ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop file are reverted.

[mainmachine]

@Odyseus

So this is a problem with Dropbox, basically?

I only observed this behaviour with Dropbox. Maybe other applications with options to start at startup do the same. I don't really know.

Yes, I just meant that the problem (and thus the solution) is on the application side, not on the O/S side. It's likely there are other applications that would do this too - it's easy to be heavy-handed, sophistication takes a bit more effort...

Someone should raise a bug with Dropbox...

[simonwiles]

Best solution for this, imo, is to make the changes you need (either by hand in the .desktop file, or using Cinnamon's "Startup Applications" panel), and then, before the next time Dropbox starts, make the dropbox.desktop file read-only. This will prevent Dropbox clobbering it on startup (it will fail silently and move on). e.g.:

chmod a-w ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop