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I also finally found a bit of time to dig deeper into why insync failed to start for me with newer versions and the result might be helpful for others.

As the latest comments indicate that insync has problems with the *.desktop file parsing, I checked those, but all of them were fine.

After that, I started insync via strace and looked through the output and noticed that it continuously went over some mount directories. I then checked the mount directories it was interested in and discovered that one of them is from a failed systemd automount unit that points to a currently disabled samba share. As soon as the service got disabled and I unmounted the broken mount, insync just started normally.

So if anyone still has problems with this, I think it is worth a shot to check all your mount locations, as for some reason insync must be able to access all of them during the startup.

The suggestion of using strace to discover the file containing the offending mimetype didn't 100% work for me, but it led me to the correct solution. The strace output kept stopping at vlc.desktop, and after running the mime checker on all the mimetypes in that file, I didn't find any of them that gave an error.

The code for checking:

from xdg.Mime import lookup

mimes_to_check = []
for m in mimes_to_check:
  lookup(m)

Anyways, the strace output showed that insync was reading many of those files multiple times. This led me to look to see if there was a place where all the mimetypes are listed. Turns out there is one and it's in the ~/.config/mimeapps.list file.

I opened the file and discovered a mimetype listed as vscode=//*=vscodium.desktop; The syntax immediately stood out to me. As soon as I deleted this entry, I was able to start insync.

Here is a simple script to find those pesky mimetypes:

egrep -ivn '^[-a-z0-9]+/[-a-z0-9]+' ~/.config/mimeapps.list

Exact same value for me, and my mpv.desktop file is unmodified.

I've checked all my .desktop files with desktop-file-validate but it doesn't report any errors with any of them about any invalid MimeTypes.

At least for the time being, version 3.8.7 seems to work.

The latest build of insync works on my machine with mpv installed. Maybe this is not related to mpv in your case? Or maybe your mpv.desktop file has been modified?

My mpv.desktop contains the following:

MimeType=application/ogg;application/x-ogg;application/mxf;application/sdp;application/smil;application/x-smil;application/streamingmedia;application/x-streamingmedia;application/vnd.rn-realmedia;application/vnd.rn-realmedia-vbr;audio/aac;audio/x-aac;audio/vnd.dolby.heaac.1;audio/vnd.dolby.heaac.2;audio/aiff;audio/x-aiff;audio/m4a;audio/x-m4a;application/x-extension-m4a;audio/mp1;audio/x-mp1;audio/mp2;audio/x-mp2;audio/mp3;audio/x-mp3;audio/mpeg;audio/mpeg2;audio/mpeg3;audio/mpegurl;audio/x-mpegurl;audio/mpg;audio/x-mpg;audio/rn-mpeg;audio/musepack;audio/x-musepack;audio/ogg;audio/scpls;audio/x-scpls;audio/vnd.rn-realaudio;audio/wav;audio/x-pn-wav;audio/x-pn-windows-pcm;audio/x-realaudio;audio/x-pn-realaudio;audio/x-ms-wma;audio/x-pls;audio/x-wav;video/mpeg;video/x-mpeg2;video/x-mpeg3;video/mp4v-es;video/x-m4v;video/mp4;application/x-extension-mp4;video/divx;video/vnd.divx;video/msvideo;video/x-msvideo;video/ogg;video/quicktime;video/vnd.rn-realvideo;video/x-ms-afs;video/x-ms-asf;audio/x-ms-asf;application/vnd.ms-asf;video/x-ms-wmv;video/x-ms-wmx;video/x-ms-wvxvideo;video/x-avi;video/avi;video/x-flic;video/fli;video/x-flc;video/flv;video/x-flv;video/x-theora;video/x-theora+ogg;video/x-matroska;video/mkv;audio/x-matroska;application/x-matroska;video/webm;audio/webm;audio/vorbis;audio/x-vorbis;audio/x-vorbis+ogg;video/x-ogm;video/x-ogm+ogg;application/x-ogm;application/x-ogm-audio;application/x-ogm-video;application/x-shorten;audio/x-shorten;audio/x-ape;audio/x-wavpack;audio/x-tta;audio/AMR;audio/ac3;audio/eac3;audio/amr-wb;video/mp2t;audio/flac;audio/mp4;application/x-mpegurl;video/vnd.mpegurl;application/vnd.apple.mpegurl;audio/x-pn-au;video/3gp;video/3gpp;video/3gpp2;audio/3gpp;audio/3gpp2;video/dv;audio/dv;audio/opus;audio/vnd.dts;audio/vnd.dts.hd;audio/x-adpcm;application/x-cue;audio/m3u;audio/vnd.wave;video/vnd.avi;

In the cases I've seen with other desktop files that insync didn't like, the problem was that a type had no subtype (e.g. "audio" instead of "audio/opus").

@hades How can we determine which mime types are invalid?

Mine seemingly stops when trying to parse mpv.desktop from the mpv package in extra. The MimeType line seems fine to me, no obviously incorrect mime types listed, but I'm also not entirely sure what I'm actually looking for.

As far as I could tell, it's only there to show icons in the file browser (I didn't decompile the entire binary though, so it might just as well send it along with the rest of the telemetry).

@hades you're a life saver! Thanks big time for yor hint to use strace to find the .desktop file that caused an exception. After fixing it, Insync's GUI loads up just fine.

Although I'm not quite sure why are all my .desktop files scanned during Insync's start up routine...

I've also opened an issue in pyxdg: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/pyxdg/-/issues/36

@hades - Thankyou! 3.9.0.60000 is now working for me. In my case the offending file was leftover from a fixefox install back in 2013.

I was able to find the root cause and reproduce this problem. This happens when you have a .desktop file with an invalid MIME type.

To solve this, you can find which .desktop file is broken on your system, e.g. by using strace:

strace -f --trace=file --status=successful /usr/bin/insync start --no-daemon

(look for the last opened .desktop file before the exception).