How can I fix this strange icon in wingpanel?

Question

The top left icon.

No idea what can it be. I havent installed anything new, just when i started my computer it was there. Any ideas?

Answer 1

How to find out which application indicator is broken

You can end the process of each application you are used to see wing-panel step by step and see when the broken indicator hides.

In my case it was the Dropbox indicator.

How to fix the Dropbox indicator

You can run the following script from Nathan Dyer to fix it:
https://github.com/nathandyer/elementary-dropbox-mods

Answer 2

Also, you can know which applications are using indicators (other than the elementaryOS defaults) executing on terminal:

dbus-send --type=method_call --print-reply --dest=com.canonical.indicator.application /com/canonical/indicator/application/service com.canonical.indicator.application.service.GetApplications | grep "object path"

See the output to find what applications are running with an indicator.

Answer 3

since the link in accepted answer is already invalid, I'd like to give another link. The link below contains custom install script for DropBox.

https://github.com/zant95/elementary-dropbox

This requires re-install of Dropbox, however.

Answer 4

The likely culprit is Dropbox as others have mentioned, since Dropbox does not recognize elementary OS's Desktop interface.

This solution will not require a reinstall of Dropbox. I would however recommend running dropbox stop from the terminal. Once you have completed the below steps, you can restart the service by running dropbox start.

The easiest and most straight forward solution is to add the following lines to /usr/bin/dropbox, just after import os

os.environ['XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP']="Unity"
os.environ['QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE']="''"