Sandboxed nextcloud desktop client for Linux and system integration

📱 Desktop & mobile clients 💻 Desktop
1

Since I had trouble with the natively packaged nextcloud client, I tried the three available sandboxed cross-distro packages, the AppImage, the snap and flatpak. With all of them, system integration (with Nautilus, Caja, Nemo or Dolphin) also does not work, you do not get the overlay icons or the nextcloud functions in the context menu.

I wonder whether this is just an inherent limitation of those sandbox formats which cannot be overcome. snap and flatpak both use separate file system hierarchies, so that e.g. /usr/share/caja-python/extensions/syncstate-Nextcloud.py which provides the integration with the MATE file manager Caja does not get installed to its proper location where caja looks for it. One could place a symlink manually, but such kludges should not be required. I haven’t checked where the sandboxed client places its socket to communicate with the file manager extensions.
It seems worst with the AppImage format, because there, everything is packed within one file, that gets unpacked and mounted at runtime, so that choosing autostart in the nextcloud client settings has no effect, because the file which is to be autostarted this way is not the AppImage, but the nextcloud binary within the AppImage, which gets unpacked only when the AppImage is launched.

I am sure that the developers of these distribution systems have also noticed these issues, I just wonder what the conclusion is. If it is that we are just going to have to live with it, then it is not an option for nextcloud, because without system integration, it is not really fun. Does anyone know what the situation and what the plans are in this regard?

2

See this issue - in short, this isn’t really possible:

Snaps and Appimages can’t add extensions for file managers.

3

How about getting file manager integration with the Flatpak version?

I currently have to have both the Flatpak version and the distro version of the client installed in order to have the file manager integration enabled when using the Flatpak client (on Debian/Ubuntu the nexcloud-dolphin package depends on the nexcloud-client package which is why I have to install the distro client version). However the file manager integration works well even when the distro version of the client is not running so the only thing missing is to be able to install the file manager integration package without having to install the client package, or have the file manager integration package as a Flatpak too.

4

Thanks a lot! That limits the use quite a bit.
I feel we are hitting the limits of those sandboxing package formats left and right. Another case would be browser native messaging, whose unavailability in sandboxed package formats breaks lots of browser extensions. However, the bug reports against flatpak and snap have seen very very little activity in years. Hard to believe that they throw something out there without even thinking about this very substantial limitation.