Thursday, October 15, 2015
Dropbox UI Rewritten In Qt For Latest Experimental Linux & Windows Builds
The Dropbox Windows and Linux user interface is currently in the process of being rewritten in Qt and an experimental build (2.11.0) with this and other changes is already available for testing.
According to the forum notes, the reason behind the UI rewrite is to "fix a large number of issues/glitches you have reported over the years, improve performance, support high DPI on Windows, a new setup wizard on Linux, and more". It's also important to add that the new "UI is still rough around the edges so expect to see some things looking not quite right" for now.
According to the forum notes, the reason behind the UI rewrite is to "fix a large number of issues/glitches you have reported over the years, improve performance, support high DPI on Windows, a new setup wizard on Linux, and more". It's also important to add that the new "UI is still rough around the edges so expect to see some things looking not quite right" for now.
Here are a couple of screenshots with the latest Dropbox Qt UI running in Ubuntu 14.04:
I tested the latest Dropbox experimental build on Ubuntu 14.04 (64bit) and it worked properly for me, but the memory usage was pretty high initially: about 200-210 MiB (it decreased to about 70 MiB of RAM after about 30 minutes - Dropbox was idle the whole time). Furthermore, some users on the Dropbox forums mention an increase in memory usage on Windows too. However, this is an experimental build and bugs are to be expected.
Besides the UI rewrite, the new (still experimental) Dropbox 2.11 series also brings:
- file identifiers, which enable Dropbox to detect when files have been moved and renamed. In the future, file identifiers will be used to improve features such as Previous versions. For now, this change should be invisible;
- Windows long path support: Dropbox on Windows now supports paths longer than 260 characters however, many applications such as Windows Explorer and Microsoft Word do not;
- new Linux headless setup flow;
- faster uploads for small files;
- updated splash screens;
- new Finder icon overlays.
How to test the latest experimental Dropbox with Qt UI in Linux
If you want to test the latest Dropbox experimental build (not recommended - if you want to revert this change, your Dropbox account will be re-linked and that make take a long time, depending on your Internet connection and the size of your Dropbox), you can update your current Dropbox installation on Linux by using the following commands in a terminal:
- 32bit:
sudo apt-get install wget
dropbox stop
cd && wget https://d1ilhw0800yew8.cloudfront.net/client/dropbox-lnx.x86-2.11.0.tar.gz
tar -xvf dropbox-lnx.x86-2.11.0.tar.gz
dropbox start
rm dropbox-lnx.x86-2.11.0.tar.gz- 64bit:
sudo apt-get install wget
dropbox stop
cd && wget https://d1ilhw0800yew8.cloudfront.net/client/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-2.11.0.tar.gz
tar -xvf dropbox-lnx.x86_64-2.11.0.tar.gz
dropbox start
rm dropbox-lnx.x86_64-2.11.0.tar.gzIf later on you want to revert these changes and go back to the stable, non-Qt Dropbox version, use the following commands:
dropbox stop
rm -r .dropbox-dist/
dropbox startOr grab the latest experimental Dropbox builds from HERE (available for Linux, Windows and Mac).
via Dropbox Forums & Linux und Ich
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