Maestrial
Version: 1.4.3 Web:https://github.com/ SamSchott/maestral
Maestral is an alternative Dropbox client written in PyQt5. The official Dropbox client is also PyQt5, and so we initially wondered why the developer created Maestral in the first place?
It turns out that the project’s main goal is to provide a client for platforms and file systems that are no longer directly supported by Dropbox. Moreover, Maestral is a compact program that takes up less disk space and consumes less memory than the official Dropbox client.
Note that Maestral doesn’t support collaborative and team functionality (in contrast to Dropbox Paper) and so it’s designed for basic personal usage only. If that’s not a problem in your case, consider replacing the Dropbox client with Maestral – you’ll benefit from improved performance and slicker system integration. The latter point means that even though both clients utilise the same PyQt5 library, you’ll probably have less luck making the official Dropbox client use anything other than the Fusion style. This is due to the fact that for compatibility reasons Dropbox carries its own copies of Qt5 and Python dependencies. In contrast, Maestral relies on system-wide libraries and can be styled to match the system’s look and feel.
The tool consists of the CLI application and the GUI part. If you prefer, you can go with the CLI version only and save even more CPU and disk resources. To install both parts, use the following command:
$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade maestral[gui]
On first run Maestral will ask you to link your Dropbox account by providing the Oauth2 token. The setup wizard will also suggest storing local files in a directory with a name other than ~/Dropbox, thus enabling you to run several Dropbox clients at a time without conflict. Maestral has a tray icon with a context menu for quick actions. You can pause and resume sync, quickly access the Dropbox directory or the web site, see how much space is used and so on.