Arch Linux User Repository

@martinc you can either do what zbe described or you might also consider switching away from the AUR package for pCloud and just use the AppImage from their website and put it in a location with user-level write access. That will allow the pCloud app's integrated update mechanism to work properly, so whenever there's an update, you can just use the "update now" button in the application directly and it will even prompt you to restart the application automatically for you.

I was thinking about adopting the package, but since it has been adopted just a few days ago by @minichiello I thought they might get around to updating it.

Since I don't use a VPN, I didn't even know about that critical bug you've mentioned.

So maybe for you the best would be the AppImage solution from the website. You can take the .desktop file from this package, which got installed in /usr/share/applications/pcloud.desktop and move it to your user specific location instead ~/.local/share/applications/

You just have to adapt the Exec line in the .desktop file to reflect the new path you chose for your pcloud AppImage file.

I'm not super familiar with the process of adopting packages on the AUR, so since this one has been adopted already now, I don't know if I could just somehow become a co-maintainer or something like that.

Hope this helps you out at least.

@martinc, you don't even have to be clever to update this particular PKGBUILD.

1. Get download link of new version
2. Change _api_code to the correct one + bump pkgver
3. Update sums with 'updpkgsums'

That's it. If you're using AUR, you should get familiar with how it works.

@PhiLinux there is a new version available which solves a nasty bug (100% CPU thread on a VPN). Unfortunately I'm not clever enough to work out how to update the PKGBUILD for this version -- can you offer any pointers?

Hey @tblu

The package was just very recently disowned by rew1red. I would assume they just don't have time anymore to maintain it.

I might take a look into adopting it when the next pCloud update drops...

It is safe to use currently and we've had a few discussions to work out some kinks with it not too long ago as you can see from the comments of the past few months.

- Phil

Hi, I see the package is not maintained but it is still actual. Is it safe to use it, I assume? Is there reason to to use the appimage directly?

is there any plan to extract the files from pcloud's appimage with --appimage-extract and have those installed?

@raprism You're life-saver - this worked for me too! Thanks! How did you come up with an idea to uninstall appimagelauncher?

I had also this message in terminal and non-starting pCloud on one system:

$ pcloud
Using TARGET_APPIMAGE /opt/pcloud/pcloud-drive.AppImage

But no problem on a second ARCH system!

Turned out that I had to uninstall appimagelauncher, and thereafter restart PC (or eventually just restart systemd-binfmt service).

Thanks @m_gustafsson! This worked for me. I still can't understand if the issue is with the package, or the official AppImage :-/

Let's hope that soon this would be fixed and it would work seamlessly like before.

I experience similar problems running pcloud at the moment (under Sway). If it helps anyone I have a script that ChatGPT wrote that makes pcloud start for me:

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
# Locate the AppImage
APPIMG_PATH="$(ls "$HOME"/Applications/pcloud-drive_*.AppImage 2>/dev/null | head -n1 || true)"
if [ -z "${APPIMG_PATH:-}" ] || [ ! -r "$APPIMG_PATH" ]; then
  echo "❌ pcloud-w: AppImage not found in ~/Applications (pattern: pcloud-drive_*.AppImage)" >&2
  exit 1
fi

# Helper: is pcloud running for this user?
is_running() {
  pgrep -u "$USER" -af pcloud | grep -qE 'AppRun|pcloud-drive'
}

echo "▶ Trying to launch pCloud natively via AppImage..."
nohup "$APPIMG_PATH" >/dev/null 2>&1 &
sleep 5   # give it a bit more time to come up

if is_running; then
  echo "✅ pCloud process detected."
else
  echo "⚠️  Native AppImage launch failed, falling back to extracted run..."
  # … fallback block …
fi

echo "⚠️  Native AppImage launch failed, falling back to extracted run..."

# Fallback: extracted run
EXTRACT_DIR="$HOME/.local/pcloud-drive"
mkdir -p "$EXTRACT_DIR"
cd "$EXTRACT_DIR"

if [ ! -x squashfs-root/AppRun ]; then
  echo "⏳ Extracting AppImage contents (first run or update)..."
  rm -rf squashfs-root
  "$APPIMG_PATH" --appimage-extract
fi

echo "▶ Starting pCloud from extracted AppRun..."
nohup ./squashfs-root/AppRun "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1 &

sleep 2
if is_running; then
  echo "✅ pCloud started successfully from extracted AppRun."
else
  echo "❌ pCloud failed to start."
  exit 1
fi