Thunderbird 102
blog.thunderbird.net
blog.thunderbird.net
So in the interest of balance I have to say thunderbird is a excellent program. I use it as my daily driver in work and for personal use.
It has so many features that puts me, the user, in control that I totally take them for granted until I have to use outlook for something.
I use it in a multinational, I used it with exchange and now with office 365. People can complain away but there are many like me who rely on it every single day and it has a real, positive impact on our work lives every single day.
Some days are just email client and Web browser, and without thunderbird and Firefox working for me as the user...... I dunno, work would be a lot more frustrating I guess. MASSIVE thanks to all the contributors to thunderbird!
It was a lovely mail client. It seems they're repeating all the mistakes that firefox made. Firefox added pocket, everyone disabled it and eventually the feature was removed. Firefox added chat, everybody disabled it and eventually the feature was removed.
Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure.
The last update made the context-menus and dropdown-menus white backgrounded menus with literally no border, so you had no way to determine where the menu background ended and the email background started. That was the update that pushed me over the edge and prompted the rollback and push of whatever 60-ish version I chose. My staff need imap and calendaring and consistency. That version delivers.
I have absolutely zero interest in playing the 'what spurious UI change will throw my staff into confusion today' game with a basic productivity tool.
Thunderbird has had XMPP and other chat for many, many years now.
'It supports XMPP' that's great. ICQ support would arguably be more useful.
I'm pretty happy with added Matrix support though, may make me take a look at Thunderbird again in addition to aerc.
It reports its user agent as "Ripcord"
Does that mean 0 cases (timeframe?) and official confirmation from the discord team that ripcord is allowed?
If not it can and will happen (as before). Why would it be inherently different with ripcord?
Last I heard Discord maintains the TOS are getting violated, but apparently the popularity of Ripcord keeps the conflict mostly at bay.
I don't like it and barely use it, but a couple of times a year I need to monitor certain groups, so I have a Franz tab which frames the webapp.
[citation needed]
Maybe Jabber has more? But I doubt it.
It does, if you opt in.
You can also disconnect from IRC entirely from the bridge admin room.
Finally, if someone joins a channel via Matrix and then disappears without parting or disconnecting, then after 30d we’ll boot them off IRC anyway.
Thunderbird users? I'd say ~100% of them use imap, probably ~75% of them use calendaring. I don't know whether Thunderbird uses ical or imap-type calendars behind the scenes but it works with gmail, zimbra and apple type shared/hosted calendars which account for basically ~100% of the non-exchange type calendars in common use. It probably supports exchange-type calendars too though I've never tried that.
I'd wager less than ~2% of TB users use a non-slack non-discord non-irc chat.
I think that TLS is the only new protocol level feature I'm using compared to 30 years ago. Anything else is in the UI and keeping the software compatible with new versions of the OS.
What was I using back then? Some emacs mail client with filters I wrote in elisp. I got my current folder structure started in emacs (roughly one folder per person and customer) and kept it through all the moves to Eudora, Netscape's mail client and Exchange Express until I landed to Thunderbird (desktop) and K9 (phone, much later on.) Work email was on Exchange when I was an employee, always separated from personal email.
Which works so well across multiple devices, which is a very very common use-case for email. Either you have some homebrew sync going on or you have a very simple email use-case.
My 35 years experience with email: I don't need to read old messages when I'm not at my computer. I never did before 2011 (first Android phone) and nothing changed after then. I can easily figure jobs that need constant access to the complete email archive. Not my one.
And I don't need mail on tablets and my old phone. I've got my main phone always with me, but the setup would be the same.
One reason it works for me could be that communication moved increasingly from email to messaging platforms and those are on my phone, except Slack which is confined to work boundaries. However I feel like I can lose all of WhatsApp and Telegram messages with no harm. I already lost a few years of WhatsApp and nothing happened. Who cares about conversations of 3 years or 3 days ago. It's mostly nearly unsearchable trash. And everybody else and I never had a verbatim trace of any IRL conversations for million of years, so they could be nice to have feature but not an important one.
But I'm doing my best not to lose mail. The long term important messages are in there.
[[Citation needed]]
Also, I know people use a lot of addons. Are there any that I should look into?
I also noticed something odd. I closed it and reopened and lost all the info. I didn't install from snap or apt because apt was providing version 92 so I installed manually. I do see ~/.thunderbird (no ~/.config) but seems odd that the info wasn't stored there. This is a big red flag. ~~I also can't find in the settings where to specify the storage location.~~ (found)
I don't use those folders, I also don't use a local email client these days...
But regarding the categories, Gmail doesn't automatically expose these to IMAP. But there is something you can do even if a bit hacky.
Create 5 labels named after the 5 Categories. Then create 5 filters each of which look something like this.
Search criteria: "category:primary" -> Apply label "primary".
Repeat the above step for all the categories. Et Voila. Your categories will appear in IMAP as folders of the same name.
It works really well if you are comfortable on the command line to get it running.
Works very well, calendar too
For about 3 years I used a plug in I paid $20 for (after a trial) that was money well spent for me.
Then I think thunderbird and lightening (for calendar) started everything better natively than the plug in sp I went to just native setup.
There is a group of Linux users who kinda support each other also so I wrote up a post on how to get it all working.
Then I'll be honest about 2 or three years ago we moved to office 365, and when I configured it I think everything just magically started working.
And by working I mean getting better at each release.
It now allows native OAuth2 over imap which I think was a huge step in making it play nice.
I use plugins: lookout (not sure what this does), tbsync with provider for Exchange and provider for Google Calendar (this syncs across all my devices).
I just had a look there so I can give people an idea...
Got well over 100k emails in the work account (office365).
Bout 15k In my shammy gmail
Use proton mail bridge also which is another nice program.
I'm on Ubuntu.
I'm trying not to dox myself here lol
https://addons.thunderbird.net/de/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/?...
Sadly no sign of support for EWS, but Evolution supports that.
Edit: From the github issues page: "I am working on an upgrade, ETA 2 weeks."
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsyn...
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4...
It's an excellent piece of software no matter what and I'm not sure you can do a much faster and lightweight email client anyway, because it basically needs to be a web browser to render HTML emails properly (but I'm pretty sure the search feature could be an order of magnitude faster)
Search is generally instantaneous on my system, including my work mails. Maybe you need to repair your index or something?
On the RAM department it's using ~750MB of memory, which is not low in any means, but considering the mail volume it's handling, it's acceptable for me.
Thunderbird performance has never been an issue for me, except for one issue where it occasionally starts chewing CPU when syncing my monster inbox. This issue to be fair has become very rare in the last two years.
I have never seen that CPU eating behavior on mine, and the mailbox is nowhere small.
In other words, I love Thunderbird, I have no complaints.
There is a way to delete your search dB (its an sqlite file in your profile (but google first for instructions), and leave it rebuild (depending in your mailbox size it can take a day or two).
I had to do it once when I moved a bunch of folders.
The search should be instant.
It does take a few secs to start but a while back I created a new profile and imported my old rules etc and it's much quicker to start now.
Yes, Thunderbird supports OpenPGP, with a fully integrated solution.
However, Thunderbird doesn't use gpg by default, because of license incompatibility Thunderbird cannot bundle GnuPG software.
That's why Thunderbird uses the RNP library as its default OpenPGP backend.
You may optionally configure externally installed GnuPG for secret key operations, as described at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards
For how to set it up, see here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-help-setup-...
It's punchy, has decent (not awesome) UX, is easy to set up, and doesn't act like a memory leak with a UI.
My only problem with it is that the UI seems to slow down while all of the e-mails are being fetched, if you have 10-20 accounts or so connected.
I don't need chats and other stuff though. Maybe better Exchange support (because the corporate world loves it, sigh).
It should be noted that anyone who is complaining is probably a regular user of the application, and as such has decided that they over-all like the application enough to use it.
I was just thinking of the open source contributors who must feel really down getting just negative feedback, hence I hoped to give a bit of balance.
Also, there is nothing wrong with emotional needs. The majority of our needs beyond the basic are emotionally driven. I like my emotions ;)
> ...you’ll find out-of-box support for the popular, decentralized chat protocol Matrix in Thunderbird 102
Personally, I see these two statements as being directly contradictory. I'm glad to see Thunderbird's maintenance continuing well, but I want it to be a focused app. On the other hand, I have been glad to have out of the box Lightning integration, so perhaps I will come to enjoy the Matrix addition as well.
Matrix support is probably a ton easier.
Besides, matrix is designed to be implemented by multiple parties. Exchange isn’t. In fact, exchange is almost certainly the opposite.
Believe there are libraries available as well.
I don't blame the devs, Exchange is a proprietary standard so you can't expect it to work well. It's like the reverse-engineered drivers for hardware the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for: it doesn't work great, but that's despite the devs' best effort, not because of it.
it has been working beautifully for me in the past 6-7 years
including calendar and contacts
> the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for
you mean documentation, like this?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/w...
Microsoft has many flaws, but not writing documentation it's not usually one of them.
There are at least two, based on EWS (Exchange Web Services):
- evolution-ews (Gnome)
- akonadi-ews (KDE)
A lot of companies seem to have switched to Office365 which is not the same thing and most of the one I have worked with block third-party clients in their security policies.
As cloud costs ratchet up and the weaknesses become more apparent, I suspect you'll see orgs start migrating back away from the cloud.
To be honest though, I'm interested in how the Matrix support will look. While I think the Element client is nice, and certainly the best of the Matrix clients I've tried, I wouldn't mind not having to have that during work hours so much.
For RSS, I'm sticking with Newsblur though!
Paid account is US$36/year.
You can sign up with a free try-before-you-buy account to give it a go first, though.
Best of the both worlds can be achieved, for example, with good extension support. That way, Thunderbird devs can focus on a set of core features, while the community handles the rest.
Also, why not look Thunderbird as a Communication Software instead of just an Email Client?
Let's just face the fact here: email is dying. Once it was one of the most important tools for communicating on the Internet, now days for majority of people, it's just something comes with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account.
The protocols (POP3/SMTP/IMAP) are heavily outdated as well, and no one is seriously improving it in order to make them more fitting for today's needs (by improving, I mean to make it more real-time, more multi-media friendly, and more efficient so it can transmit a huge amount of data simultaneously at lighting speed). Just take look how many improvement has been done to HTTP as a comparison, it's sad that email protocols received so little loves.
At this circumstances, I would say any optimization done to the ecosystem is welcome. Also, I like the new interface more, IMO it makes Thunderbird at least 10 years younger.
The downside is that, JSON codes creates redundancy, sometime the redundancy is bigger than the meaningful data itself. But on the other side, you can now host an email server behind a web CDN. I like the development overall.
Except that Thunderbird has been actively holding back its own extension support, diverting people to the silly "WebExtensions" and making it more difficult to load and run regular extensions.
(In Firefox it's even worse - it seems you can't load regular extensions at all these days.)
> Let's just face the fact here: email is dying. Once it was one of the most important tools for communicating on the Internet, now days for majority of people, it's just something comes with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account.
It is not dying, but rather - powerful commercial interests are trying to assassinate it. These companies love to control your private data, analyze it, sell it, pass it on to the government (Snowden revelations), and use it to market stuff to you. We all need to make a concerted effort to change this state of affairs.
Both are overengineered systems designed to solve one thing only: establish multiple reliable transmissions streams between two endpoints while only doing the handshake once.
It does very little that's actually useful in practice.
I've been playing around with a testing version (beta? nightly? can't remember) and am very excited about the chat integration. I'm not sure if it will be useful in the office, which is small enough for people to just talk to one another, but it could come in handy in some circumstances where we'd normally use an email chain.
For what reason? Are they planning to leave Gmail? That’s just about the only reason for an office to mandate a specific UI for email.
Thunderbird ended up being an easier option than Roundcube webmail (probably in part because some users had used Thunderbird in the past). It wasn't a mandate per se but my users aren't super technical and like to all use the same program, plus local storage makes it easy to keep local backups of mailboxes.
The reason I switched to thunderbird is that it displays each email on a single line, which is sooooo much more information dense, and thus efficient! There's no better way to manage a large amount of email than displaying a large amount on screen!
They said it might be fixed before the bugs 20th anniversary, so less than one year to go, but I somehow doubt it.
I wish they would not. I don't want any UI changes on my email client. Ever. It is one of my most important tools for work, so I don't want to tolerate anything that breaks or changes my workflow.
I am super happy user of thunderbird but if they keep doing this "modernizing" thing I will have to switch to a more stable mail client (after my current version that I never plan on updating breaks that is).
It is an application that receives content from the Internet, your advice is dreadful. Email is a primary vector for exploitation.
The modern example of fuckhead UI changes. Changing settings without having to click apply and/or OK. Changing from the "cog" icon to those three idiotic bars (hamburger?).
Interfaces are often used by people who are not IT savvy. The simplest of UI changes can mess their decade(s) old patterns of usage, the elderly are the easiest example of users affected by this. It not just their individual problem, those people then reach out for help which can be at considerable personal financial expense.
I dream of a future when normal interfaces and drop-down menus return.
This era ~15 years ago must have been peak GUI design, with many applications being both beginner-friendly and powerful. And if your grandma called, you could easily steer her through menus over the phone. Nowadays, good luck describing the latest incarnation of the hamburger icon over the phone, especially when all the other monochrome line drawings look quite similar to aging eyes.
Now I can just tell family to use Thunderbird and they already have their first Matrix client, which they can install on mobile in a jiffy. It would be nice if it could make another dent in Whatsapp's monopoly (in my country). I just hope account creation is easy... Will check it out!
Thanx TB team!
Probably not surprising as Mozilla moved from IRC to matrix.
By design. Why do you think gmail strips encrypted archive attachments? Surprised they even allow S/MIME.
Because Gmail can't scan for malware inside those attachments?
The biggest UX hurdle is handling the private keys.
Identity-validated is indeed administratively harder, though in my opinion that part should be done by the state/country authorities - digital driver licenses, state ID's and national ID's could just have that as well. Some EU countries have done exactly that, but software support is lacking.
The physical security they built into the facility housing the root CA was pretty intense.
1) Accepted recurring calendar events that started in the past would pop up reminders that could not be dismissed (they would just pop up again immediately).
2) Thunderbird had problems embedding meeting links in the calendar event (especially, if the meeting was rescheduled), so you'd have to go find the original meeting invite email.
For those two reasons, I ended up installing Outlook to handle corporate stuff while TB took care of everything else.
I see from the release notes that these two issues have been worked on so I'll have to see what happens when I re-add my corporate account again; it will be great if the calendar is fixed.
What you can do:
For 1) You can configure TB to not show event notifications from the past
For 2) Things improved at least a bit, so for me, this is usable now
How do I do that?
https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap#maildir
> Maildir is a message storage format that should improve data safety, allow for incremental (delta) backups of messages and allow for antivirus to interact better with messages. Maildir will be vastly improved for 102, but may not be pref'd on by default.
The second is that it didn’t deal well with accounts where I might’ve had 50-100k messages in the inbox. Lots of intermittent freezing during interaction.
Finally, I used it for a decade but it never seemed to be without memory leaks. I wasn’t using any extensions, it just leaked. Had to restart it every day.
Evolution doesn’t have any of these issues. Would love to come back to it, though!
After figuring out that gmail login will only work with cookies being enabled in the setting I am super happy to finally have a sane folder & filtering interface. I'll probably stick with google's UI for the agendas for now, but overall this is being really smooth.
Ironically, the search in thunderbird, while not perfect, is so much better than on gmail, where I often have trouble finding emails from half an hour ago, searching for the exact subject line.
EDIT: and spam filtering! It's amazing how many really important emails gmail flagged as spam for me. Like, mails coming from colleagues on the same custom domain, as replies to emails I sent them. I really don't get why people use google's products, honestly. At this point it's just pure monopoly I guess, and increasingly network effects since the big providers don't play well with smaller ones.
What are other options of having your web-based client log into your email?
Edit: ah, there's an image here at least https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/thunderbird
A little bit odd, perhaps, for an email client to feature Matrix chat functionality but no support for Exchange accounts. Hope it's on their roadmap though.
It's possible that your Yubikey/Titan Security Key doesn't get recognised by the in-application browser window, but IMAP definitely support this standard.
When the token's been retrieved there's obviously no 2FA, but neither is there any 2FA for Exchange once it's been set up.
I can't tell if it's just being lazy or there is some FUD. Owa is a poor client on multiple accounts...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/Exchange/clients/pop3-and-i...
You, you can use smartcards with OpenPGP, if you configure Thunderbird for optional GnuPG support. This way Thunderbird can use your secret key that is managed by GnuPG, for secret key operations, including keys on smartcards.
How to do that is documented here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards
Evolution supports exchange properly, by contrast (well, I did have to ask my boss to whitelist an app id somewhere in the server settings, but that was no problem).
After some initial adjustment, I find evolution equally as capable as thunderbird. Both don't necessarily win design prizes (well maybe this new version of thunderbird does, but certainly not the old one), but if that was important to me, I wouldn't use Linux. :) I would even say that I prefer the calendar integration in evolution.
[0] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/owl-f...
I recently circled about RSS feeds again and looked into "not Browser Addon" RSS clients - Feedbro as an extension is pretty good, has some shortcomings, and requires the browser to be left active 24/7 to catch ALL of a few of the feeds I follow.
Thunderbird accepts RSS feeds but, for better or worse, is extremely strict about only accepting fully compliant RSS | ATOM spec verified feeds.
There are a number of older "RSS feeds" that are compliant XML but missing a few recent feature fields - these work in Feedbro and other more accepting clients but fail in Thunderbird.
It's a minor quibble, I should write a note to the devs I guess, but it did dash my idea of having the one email+RSS feed hub active 24|7.
I like the new UI - seems a bit more compact than previous one - a nice chnage comparing to useless space wasted in most of the apps we have today.
Hope they will focus on editor in the upcoming versions - if only they could make html tables as good as they are in Outlook...
https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/153930732204379750...
If you want to target the message list specifically, I'm pretty certain that can be done with a userChrome.css tweak.
Will desktop Linux ever solve these basic usability problems?
Or will this always just be user error! you're doing it wrong!
On other platforms (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS) it’s fairly common to distribute GUI apps as a single binary so you don’t need an army of package maintainers. Perks of having many years of ABI stability.
Scroll down and you’ll see people arguing about supported features because they’re running an ancient version of Thunderbird supplied by their distro.
I think it's unfortunate anyone offers .deb (or similar) downloads really - the many Linux distros don't have a single packaging mechanism, so why pretend they do, or that your app's not going to work on the ones you don't provide?
Just say it's built for Linux, perhaps here's a binary, here's the source if available, this is the preferred name, go and check your package manager.
You can do this on Linux, too, be it by compiling a static binary or bundling everything as an AppImage or what have you.
Frankly, I find it annoying that it isn't done as a matter of course.
I can't comment deeply on deb vs rpm, it is kinda disappointing that we have this split, and I don't know if there's a great way to merge it back.
Mac does have a good distribution story. This also exists on Linux in the form of app images. The one missing piece is that Mac has the Applications convention. AppImageLauncher[0] solves this, but really it would be good for Gnome/KDE to just integrate this concept. That gives the (important!) "have the application show up in the application launcher" option.
I do not believe one could qualify Windows programs as being distributed as a single binary. A single installer, perhaps! But many Windows programs dump files all over your file tree to do things, and then goes to touch stuff in your registry. There's a reason we have "portable executables" for windows as its own download option!
* A desktop package that isn’t a vehicle for ads (like Windows and ChromeOS).
* A desktop package that doesn’t require you to write your own one-off scripts to work around stupid deficiencies (like GNU/Linux).
* A desktop package that doesn’t constantly throw away all its “legacy” and break a bunch of stuff (like Mac).
The Linux kernel itself has a well publicized policy of not breaking user space and binary compatibility, but pretty much all distros regularly break binary compatibility, they require software to dynamically link to os provided shared libraries, and they don't allow statically linked programs to be distributed using their package managers.
Packaging and distributing software for windows or macOS is really easy. Doing the same for Linux, particularly desktop applications, is a huge pain.
It's a point that Linus Torvalds has often bemoaned[0][1].
[0]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whs8QZf3YnifdLv57+FhBi5_W...
Go nearly always does this for example (although in some version they switched to dynamically linking to glibc for the stub resolver) and you can take statically linked go binaries and copy them to totally different OSes as long as the architecture is compatible. I remember taking a copy of syncthing and copying it between my Android and a Raspberry pi at one point (or maybe it was a kindle and a raspberry pi) which run totally different OSes and it worked just fine (ignoring the Android stupidity of course.)
I don't think comparing "state of packages got off of apt" to "state of downloaded installers for Mac/Windows" is an apples to apples comparison.
Yes, the reasons for why it's more complicated on Linux are varied, the fragmentation of the desktop Linux ecosystem might be the other main factor.
However I think comparing the status quo between each OS is fair.
Appimage seems cool, I don't have experience with it, so I can't speak to how well it works.
I do agree it's fragmented and frustrating where we've ended up for installers. My main critique is more that the state of linux packaging _isn't_ what thunderbird is doing here.
It's an automated Rube Goldberg machine. Linux used to have these as well! I remember clearly the hacky automated Java 6 install script and the VirtualBox drivers that came as a several executable hundred megabytes in size.
You can static link if you want. You need to watch out for core system libraries like glibc (just like you need to watch out for Win7/8.1/10/11 on Windows) but that's about it.
Packaging for Linux is easy. You can even automatically test if your packages work on different distributions! You can read about it here: https://appimage-builder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro/tuto...
If the developers of thunderbird want, they can supply a binary compiled against your specific distro/version, or a statically-linked binary, or a container like an AppImage
Though it can be difficult to download and run random software from the internet, I have to say, most Linux distributions have got the software distribution challenge through their package managers right compared to OSX and Windows. First thing I do on an OSX machine is install homebrew which helps a little.
Snap is a slightly worse, proprietary sandboxing mechanism pushed by Canonical, the people making money off it. It has some fundamental problems (boot being slowed down by all the snaps being mounted, for example, Firefox acting weird and sometimes not even launching until I reboot since 22.04) and some ideological problems (the fact you can't host your own snap store without paying Canonical, the fact Snap blatantly refuses to follow standards like XDG or even just folder naming in the home directories, forcing a lowercase "snap" folder on everyone).
Some people are against the appification that's taking a toll on user freedom. Some people are in favour of the excellent permission monitoring and dependency conflict resolution it allows. Both sides seem to conclude that snap isn't the right answer.
1. Tar files of compressed binaries 2. No use your release's package manager 3. No, snaps 4. No you fool, flatpak is the superior solution. 5. I'll just finish this off by saying distributing source code is the obviously best way, you posers.
I personally prefer the distro-based approach, but for tools that need to be kept up to date independently of the rest of the system I'm a Flatpak fan.
People, collectives, and companies have preferences. There is no one single way.
In a similar vein, how do I distribute Windows software? Do I put it up on the Microsoft store, do I provide a download with instructions for my msix file or is appx more suitable for my use case? Do I add a compatibility layer for .exe to sacrifice the security sandboxing brings to make the file nice and clickable? Or do I use .msi to use the system UI that's easy to set up (but impossible to navigate for computer illiterate people). Or wait, maybe Steam and Epic Launcher are a better fit? Hell, maybe I can get away with uploading the APK to the Amazon App Store so I can target Android and Windows 11 in one go!
What about macOS? Mac Store, .dmg disk image, simple .zip file, or maybe a self-extracting installer? Do I need to include one of those weird screens that tells the user to drag an icon into a picture of a folder? That's what a lot of third party software had me do when I first tried it, though it took me a while to understand what it was asking of me!
Or is it better to use Brew/WinGet? It doesn't have the GUI, but it allows serious people to set up my software exactly how they like it.
The startup times are ridiculously slow (multiple seconds or even worse) at least on some machines (I've only ever experienced them to be sluggish, but some people say the opposite, so...) and this is particularly egregious for e.g. firefox or a password manager (bitwarden).
Because I just couldn't bear it anymore I uninstalled the firefox snap and installed the flatpak instead. Flatpak solves similar problems, but doesn't seem to be as sluggish, at least for the applications I've used.
I agree that the implementation could be much improved. In particular, I'd like to see a switch to EROFS images.
>I can't stop my phone's apps from updating whenever they feel like it
Play Store > Settings > Network Preferences > Auto Update Apps...
You can also set the option to not update automatically on individual apps. When they show up in the Updates Available tab, click the hamburger menu next to one and there's an option to turn off auto-updates. Handy to stop YouTube automatically updating and wiping YouTube Vanced!
No, it's not. Unless you do some weird hacks that aren't officially guaranteed to work (and now that the old READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission has been fully deprecated, don't result in the most natural UX flow, either), Google's sandboxing on Android has e.g. broken the scenario of using a file manager to open a locally stored HTML file in a browser, because following the official API, the browser won't be able to resolve any relative links to other HTML documents or subresources like images/stylesheets/scripts.
Other multi-file file formats are similarly broken, and this more or less applies to all the sandboxing solutions I'm aware of, no matter whether Android, iOS, Windows, Mac or Linux. The only exception I'm aware of is that the macOS desktop sandboxing has some provisions for handling "related" files that only differ in the file extension, but even that of course doesn't handle all scenarios – the aforementioned HTML file example still wouldn't work for example.
>The easiest and best way for you (you'll get updates through signed packages, etc) is probably to install via the Ubuntu Software Center.
* Software & Up...
* Software Upda...
* Ubuntu Software
The first two have virtually the same icon and [as per my transcription above] the names are truncated but are presumably "Software & Uodates" and "Software Update" --why two almost identical looking apps for this?
The third "Ubuntu Software" [which is the one I actually need to install 3rd party applications] isn't even visible until I scroll to the second screen of icons.
So three different apps for installing / updating software. Two of which look almost identical. And that's Ubuntu being the supposedly most user-friendly distro!
But “desktop Linux” is not an entity that can solve anything. It’s a loose collection of people and organizations all doing their own thing. If Thunderbird gives you an installer on Windows and an archive full of files rather than an installer on Linux, well…
It's about as similar to the 'download untrusted software, double click to run it, and hope/pray/assume it handles updates itself' workflow found elsewhere as you can get.
I have several non-technical family members using Linux. They don't struggle getting software at all, regardless of it not being just-like-others.
There's software portals just like the stores on other platforms and they generally bridge the gap between packages/containers well.
Nobody installs from archives like Slackware anymore, or they shouldn't.
Just stop distributing binaries, it's unprofessional.
You need to then secure the source, handle security concerns, install AV, you might as well use windows or OSX which have extensive controls for these things already inplace...
It's convenient, but unwise.
With that said/considered, I don't think it's a big deal - anyone non-technical should be happy with whatever their distribution maintainers provide.
They won't be watching mailing lists hoping to grab the latest $thing :)
Software does need to stop linking to these tar files.
Ubuntu provides thunderbird both as a stable release and as a containerized snap with rolling release semantics. Snap downloads are authenticated and secure. Get it from here if you want the latest and greatest, though they haven't blessed 102 as stable yet (it's still "latest/candidate" as of right now): https://snapcraft.io/thunderbird
In this case, though, I think you're complaining overmuch. What you got was a tarball intended for install from the command line, which is a distribution format well-understood by Linux hackers since before most of the commenters here were born. It's certainly not a "basic usability problem" to provide software in a consistent format for 30 years!
If you are on Debian’ish and you download anything other than .deb files I don’t know what you expect.
You... kind of are though, to the extent that what you tried wouldn't work on Windows either (equivalent to trying to run a program in a zip without extracting it). Extract the directory and run the thing called thunderbird in it.
Even if I get a tarball on OSX I can double click on it and then drag the application into the "Applications" directory or run the installer. I'm not sure why this is so challenging on Linux.
Linux distros have a complex network of dependancies, config files, and general crap that requires sophisticated tooling to manage which is different on different distros. All to save a few kb of storage space.
The real reason macOS and Windows are easier to distribute software on is because there's only one Windows and only one macOS. "Linux" is not an operating system, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, RHEL, etc. are all different operating systems that just so happen to share a kernel and a similar ecosystem of open source software. So compatibility between them is more of a coincidence than anything else.
Luckily nowadays we have Flatpaks and AppImages, which both solve the problem of simplifying app distribution and installation universally for all distros. Although devs will probably get a lot of hate if they only distribute their app as a Flatpak or AppImage and don't also offer tarballs/debs/rpms...so app distribution is likely to remain complicated for a while.
All without opening or requiring the user to open a hideous terminal just to run the app.
> I'm not sure why this is so challenging on Linux.
Desktop Linux fundamentally can never solve this problem. All of the packaging alternatives of alternatives have created a mess and confusion around which distro can open what and not only these alternatives even work out of the box, there is no guarantee that all Linux distros will be supported for that.
At most it is a 'solution' creating a new problem; whist still looking for a problem to solve.
It's not really a Linux thing, it's a Thunderbird thing.
The equivalent would be for Thunderbird to link a .xapp file for Windows users. Good luck installing those by yourself, same with random tar.bz2s.
Of course, downloading random executables is not The Linux Way. I understand the pattern as a holdover from Windows, but it really shouldn't be the way people get taught to install software. Your distro either has a graphical package manager built in that's in control of this type of software (through their native packages or through Flatpak/AppImage/Snap/whatever) that will also keep your software updated.
IMO, distros should come with a "quick start" to explain the concepts of the software store and Thunderbird.net should default to .deb files so most people can just install it the normal way.
You don't understand how archives work and are trying to run a program with many files from an archive before first extracting it to a folder in your filesystem.
You could have taken this time spent blaming Linux and used it to google around a little bit and learn something new. I recommend learning a bit about how your filesystem works and why it can't find linked files from within an archive. This is essential computing knowledge.
The fact that you are not aware that Ubuntu comes with a software package manager means you are still inexperienced and should not blame the system until you have spent more time with it.
You similarly shouldn't blame a car for bad UX because you have to take a class and multiple exams before understanding how to use it?
...
We see the usability problems here.
Billions of people use computers (most of which are, for historical reasons, called "phones") that require none of this "essential" knowledge, and they do just fine. Don't you think humanity is better off for freeing all these people from having to spend their brief time on Earth from having to learn about archives and filesystems? Sometimes difficulty isn't a mark of virtue but instead just pointless pain.
> I recommend learning a bit about how your filesystem works and why it can't find linked files from within an archive. This is essential computing knowledge.
Really? Is that _really_ essential computing knowledge?
On macOS, you download a disk image, then drag the icon into the application directory. Many publishers include a shortcut to the application directory and a background image with an arrow and instructions. It's primitive, but it works, and hasn't needed to change in like, 20 years. It requires no knowledge of linked files, or even what a disk image is. Drag and drop. Done.
If you can't install an app like that on most Linux distros (I don't think I've ever seen that), then Thunderbird probably shouldn't suggest that as an option. I've moved away from using Linux as an everyday OS because all these little usability things add up and suck too much of my time.
It works fine for me!
People who want to run macOS can do so. Why does everyone act like a free product not being everything for everyone is some kind of moral failing?
Probably because the free software movement is making (very vocally) it a moral failing that all software should be free. If all software must be free, then all free software must be everything for everyone.
It is a different operating system with completely different trade-offs. People are trying to improve usability on Linux (and things have changed substantially for the better since I first used Linux in 2006), but generally, the OS and software will hold your hand less than macOS. Actually, even Windows probably holds your hand less, macOS is clearly an outlier here.
People who like using Linux generally put up with the occasional nuisance or the necessity to sometimes dig a bit deeper when there's a problem for the increased flexibility and independence.
How come you were able to learn how to do it by drag-and-drop on macOS, even though installing an application by D&D is completely unintuitive and unique to apple, but learning how to do it the linux way is an insurmontable task that you can't expect normal people to figure out?
Why is it so hard to have a button that installs Thunderbird?
`dnf install thunderbird`
And I get thunderbird.
I'm sorry, but any reasonably complex system is going to come with a basic reading requirement. This system is much more smooth and off-the-shelf than Windows or OS X package management. Linux operating systems by far have the best modern package management.
We can blame traffic engineers all day for naive drivers, or we can compromise and hold both engineers and users accountable, requiring appropriate certification.
If reading a few pages of a quickstart manual is too hard, a simple Google search of "How to install programs on <Linux Distribution>" will immediately show you what you need.
If you can't think to do this, or feel entitled to not do it, the problem is indeed between the chair and keyboard. Any user who feels this way is in desperate need of basic research skills.
Note that no one is stopping you from running thunderbird. It sounds like you downloaded a dynamically linked binary distribution and there's probably just an elf file you need to run. Otherwise if the binary is incompatible you can build it from the source (I've never tried thunderbird, Firefox is a bit much but it's doable and there are of course ways to automate it such as running a Gentoo prefix or using the spec files from your distribution itself.)
EDIT: Linux is fine for everyone. Installing bleeding edge software from web sites is not for everyone.
I don't care if Linux has 0.00000001% market share as long as it still does what I want.
You should put yourself in the mind of someone who doesn't work with computers for a living. Then, read that to yourself again and see how much of it is complete nonsense. You should not have to know what any of those words mean to use an operating system, and if you do that is either the fault of the OS or the software, not the fault of the user.
Why not? Different OSes can serve people in different niches. This is like saying "you don't need special training to ride a tricycle, therefore the fact that you need it to drive a car is the fault of the car". If people don't want to use Ubuntu, they are free to use macOS. I will continue using Ubuntu because I know how to use it and it works for me. What's the problem?
Hey NixOS and Guix communities! Your theory is awesome, your practice is great, we just need to work on making this trivial for children.
Always think of the children
I suppose this is what my reply will boil down to, but also isn't that fine? You could do something unusual on macOS or Windows and there too throw your hands up in mock shock that it was to be labelled 'user error'.
Anyway, when I want to install software on Linux I type `yay -Ss software` (on my work/personal machines) or `apt search software` (on a Debian derivative image) etc., and then install what I've found similarly.
Thunderbird could do better here - greenfield software today might offer a Snap or Flatpak package there for example - but I don't think download via vendor website is the norm on any distribution; it tends to work on macOS & Windows, but is decreasingly primary even there; it probably could launch Ubuntu Software Center (or whatever it is) as it does App Store.app on macOS - but who wants to look up what to do and maintain everything like that for N top Linux distros?
If it were me I think I'd just have a dummy button, conveying somehow that it 'works on Linux, you should refer to your package manager'.
EDIT: Everyone here knows how to type "sudo apt install thunderbird." People are failing to install bleeding edge software. This shouldn't be surprising or upsetting.
Package managers exist for a reason. Flatpack, snap etc all exist. You can't just hand wave real complexity away by yelling "usability!" without having fiat power over an incredibly diverse ecosystem.
The lowest common denominator for installing software on Linux distributions is well below what an incurious user will put up with. If you don't want to understand that kind of low level tinkering, you have to wait for whatever ecosystem you bought into to catch up.
That might mean moving back to Apple's curated experience. That's fine; so long as Linux itself isn't a curated walled garden, it'll never be as seamless in every instance, and that's not for everyone.
Addressed by whom, exactly? "The Linux community" is busy addressing the things they care about. Nobody is telling anybody to use Linux if it doesn't work for their needs.
Linux is immensely useful to me and everyone else who uses it. It doesn't really bother me that my mom doesn't use it; she is perfectly happy with Windows. If someone made a Linux distro that was exactly as polished and easy-to-use for non-technical people as macOS or Windows is, it would not affect me at all.
Who is this strawman entity who "wants Linux to be mainstream" ? Does anyone really care? Certainly my mom doesn't, and as far as I can tell, most Linux users who are happy with it don't either.
Furthermore, it's quite easy to understand why this hasn't happened, as doing that would cost huge amounts of money and there is no incentive structure that exists to raise it.
I think it's basic human desire for things to be relatable, but more than that there are those who experience the tyranny of 'modern' life - if you interface with the world, it is perhaps natural to want to do so simply, constantly switching contexts is not productive.
I suppose, I do really care, because every time I am forced to use a system which I don't really want to use, is another time I don't really like the world I live in, I am resentful, and ultimately I really want to not care at all about the device in question.
So, for a wide range of devices I interact with, I view them as trash, because I don't care about trash either, except to remove it from my home on a regular basis.
There are others like me, I know, and there are others in similar positions but not about linux I know as well, e.g. anyone who has ever read a good book and wishes the author were more well read, and simultaneously is affronted by the cheap dime novellas they encounter while e.g. browsing a department store.
"Furthermore, it's quite easy to understand why this hasn't happened, as doing that would cost huge amounts of money and there is no incentive structure that exists to raise it."
There isn't, yet. There are various companies which have sought to bring it there. To use the (perhaps bad) author metaphor, we haven't had our JK Rowling moment yet.
There have been pushes, e.g. Ubuntu, Redhat, but so far market forces have conspired against us, not necessarily because no one cares or no attempts have been made.
Linux based OSes will never be popular and have the same freedom they have. The principles the developers have that make it free are the same ones that create these "usability problems" which make it so unpopular.
Legos, Jeeps, Cooking. HTML, Minecraft, some real-world, software options.
"Usability" can be something you buy on top of the simple system, or it can be free, depending. These aren't diametrically opposite properties of systems.
The ones doing desktop environments, UIs, package managers, etc. They thrive for mass adoption.
Developers that want their applications cross-compatible and painless for the users.
People that cannot (or are not willing to) pay for a Windows license.
The ones waiting for the "year of Linux Desktop".
> a Linux distro that was exactly as polished and easy-to-use for non-technical people as macOS or Windows
While I truly appreciate the efforts, the problem is that the above is the intention, but it's kind-of half baked right now.
For example, having to search online, open a console and editing files for simple stuff like regulating the speed of the mouse wheel.
I doubt it. I have never seen anyone in the Ubuntu community for example claiming that their goal is the "mass adoption" of Ubuntu. That's, obviously, an impossible pipe dream. Can you provide recent examples?
I'll just use common sense and say that all the evident effort that is put into Desktop environments and user applications is not just to keep their (tiny) user base happy or to be used less.
In particular, I hate that I need to have a Windows machine for gaming in addition to a Unix machine for everything else. If Linux were a substantial competitor on the desktop, more developers would feel compelled to port their games to Linux, and I wouldn't have to make that choice.
There is Windows files also distributed as zip files, just as unusable.
Never link to a deb or rpm as the primary “download”. It should be a flatpak or app image and then an advanced options section for distro specific packages.
tar.gz is opaque in a different way - the solution would be more like an interpreter - something which has a good guess how you should install/run the file.
There is the issue also of integration with the distribution, this is a problem with distribution apis - package maintainers are invested in their formats and distribution list not solid apis with which to interact. If you could build against such a set of Apis you could bundle an interpreter which just knows what to do.
Tar.gz is a hell of a lot simpler than any other format, it's not the issue, it's the desktop distros who are underfunded/at fault.
Yes, this is true.
But it is no help on RPM-family distros, or Arch-family ones, or Alpine or Void or whatever.
> and do all the right things.
No, mostly, it won't. Because the file won't be added to the OS's list of repositories and it will never get updated.
This is not automatic behaviour, but it can be: Google does this right. Do this with Chrome or Google Earth or whatever and it just magically happens, and that is the Right Thing™.
IME: it's always application devs who are upset about this, not users.
[1] That will happen in time anyway. This is a flagship app.
[2] I would not expect any distro to include a major version in its stable release. So, even if they do that, it will take months to percolate out.
[3] When it happens, it will need an OS version upgrade.
This is a standalone app release, not an OS release. It is in many OSes and it will make its way to them in time. You are conflating 2 different things.
The question we are discussing here is: I run T'bird on my own box, and I want to try the new version; how do I do that?
There are 2 possible solutions to this: either provide distro-native packages (as Google does; this is mainly appropriate to proprietary apps, which T'bird is not); or, provide some kind of cross-distro package. Since both Snap and Flatpak need support tools installed, and AppImage does not, that makes AppImage the best choice, IMHO.
Snapcraft and Flathub will do their own thing in time.
On which note, T'bird 102 is already on Snapcraft, but it does not pick up existing T'bird settings or profiles.
OTOH do not forget that Arch is a family of distros now, not a single distro, just as Debian is.
In fact I suspect that it is the 2nd biggest family of distros, after Debian.
Debian encompasses many dozens: Ubuntu, plus dozens of Ubuntu derivatives including Mint, Elementary, PopOS, ZorinOS, Linux Lite etc.; LMDE; Devuan; MX Linux; SpiralLinux; etc. etc.
Arch now encompasses at least Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Garuda and more. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch-based_distributions
But that is not the point.
The point is that _tens of millions_ are running non-Debian-derived distros, mostly ChromeOS and CloudReady/ChromeOS Flex.
Offering a .deb package is _not_ a useful approach to offering a generic Linux package, no.
FWIW, I have tried both the Snap and AppImage versions of TB 102.
Both were very easy to install. The problem is that Snap confinement meant that TB could not see my existing profile. I just got the first-run wizard.
This did not affect the AppImage, which is working well.
And like you said, Google does it. They do it with a single deb you click on.
I feel like package managers on distos are a thing that kinda make people forget that applications can be distributed “normally” outside this chain.
However, for better or for worse, it is not the Linux way.
Maybe it should be, but it isn't.
I can't think of a single Linux app that self-updates this way. I suspect that on most distros, permissions issues would prevent it.
I also suspect that if it were easy, Google would have done it. It is not a company that does things the hard way for fun.
Packaging apps as distro-native packages isn't trivial but there's tons of existing tooling for it. Ditto for hosting repos.
So what Google did is package stuff so that it adds its own repos when you install it, and then it is left up to the OS to keep it updated.
That to me says that that was an easier job than writing self-updating Linux apps, like Chrome on Windows or on macOS.
For anyone who doubts the above, think about how much help you'd have to give many of your family members (spouse, parents, kids, etc.) for installing Thunderbird or another popular desktop app.
For all of my family members, the moment they have to open a terminal to do something basic they'd say "that's it, I'm going back to macOS (or Windows)."
If you think that those competing operating systems don't have usability problems, well, all I can say is that is far from the truth. I went through the process of setting up Windows the other day and found the software installation mind-bogglingly frustrating. In every case, I was scavenging websites for software. Some of those websites felt dubious. In the case of a couple of drivers, I was dealing with the equivalent of that .tar.bz2 file.
I'm not going to claim that the Linux world is perfect. I am going to claim that the grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence.
Rather than be able to support ONE operating system 100% of the time like what you get with Windows and macOS, Desktop Linux support is an unnecessary M * N support matrix of distros, packages and desktop environments and you always end up having to select a chosen few; meaning you always anger a bunch of Linux users using exotic distros (even though they run Desktop 'Linux').
Linux packaging is beyond a dreadful disaster of in-fighting and a malestrom of frustration and confusion for the user who dares to bother. Majority of the software on Linux is still shockingly distributed via ridiculous .tar.bz2 files or requires opening a terminal to ./ execute it, if not then it is either the alternatives of AppImage, Snap, FlatPak, etc, etc which don't work on all systems out of the box. They are still solutions looking for a problem.
With Windows, and macOS packaging for them is already built into the OS and works consistently and natively as expected. A problem long solved by them but on Desktop Linux it is still an issue for a quarter of a century.
I had to install a Windows system the other day, and it was frustrating. For the most part, software had to be scavenged from various websites. Some of those sites felt less than reputable while others were avoided because they were less than reputable. Once I managed to download the installer from the developer, I found that they were rarely consistent. While most appeared to be some sort of wrapper for MSI, many were not. The user interfaces and procedures varied wildly, even with software from Microsoft themselves. On top of that, I had two drivers that were shipped as a zipped collection of files. In the case of my printer drivers, I had to run an executable file buried in one of the subfolders. In the case of the USB-RS232 bridge drivers, I had to call up the properties dialog in the device manager to update the drivers.
I am not going to deny the kernel truth in your claims about Linux. Installing software can be a mess. On the other hand, I rarely have to face that truth. Almost everything is handled by the package manager. In the case of hardware, the drivers are usually built into the kernel. The end result is that software tends to be faster and easier to install and update on Linux. At least from my experience.
Never.
As with that, little to no-one cared about Thunderbird. I should not expect the world to care either, especially on Desktop Linux, which both are complete failures after years and years of issues.
Do you understand that there isn't some unitary organization called "Linux" putting out all these different OSes like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.?
If consumers want consumer-level support, they can buy a Mac. What’s the problem?
This is, at most, a niche fraction of the Linux community.
Most people and companies involved with Linux care that it works for their own needs, not about abstract "software freedom" ideologies.
It is on Thunderbird for just distributing a weird tar file. Preferably, their download button would take you to an installation instructions page.
I swear this used to work automatically and at some point it was removed.. or maybe I'm misremembering
The icons don't show up immediately in the KDE menus, but maybe that'll get reindexed after a reboot or something
If the Windows downloaded contained nothing but a zip file with a binary then you'd have the same issue on Windows.
> Will desktop Linux ever solve these basic usability problems?
No, because it would require everybody to agree to use Flatpak to distribute working desktop applications.
Google proved the point with Android and thus fixed Linux with APK files and then it was a runaway success.
The need to fix this problem with Linux is so obvious and that it hasn't you'd have to reckon Microsoft must have found a way to divide and rule over any agreement process.
More to the point it shows the inherent weakness in open software - that is better open products have difficulty in competing against commercial ones because of stupid squabbles amongst the Open community - disagreements over minor technicalities and useability issues† means the greater objective has been lost.
This is all very annoying for average users, especially so when we've huge monopolies such as Microsoft and Google running the show. With little effective choice users capitulate to the inevitable.
Anyone who'd argue with this assessment, don't bother arguing with me, read the stats instead. Comparing the numbers of Thunderbird versus Gmail users would be a good place to start.
† For instance, when considering to use Linux the average user is horrified at having to choose from hundreds of different distros so it's no wonder he/she gives up. The sheer number of distros is madness, it's such a fractured effort. I can't think of another comparable instance in the tech world where things have gotten so out of control.
What "greater objective" do you refer to? My objective is to have an OS that I have control over and can reasonably understand. For me that tends to be debian. So I guess for me the greater objective is satisfied.
For starters, this is a serious social problem as computing has become ubiquitous and is now essential for almost all of the population worldwide. Unfortunately the only really practical solution to suit the needs of typical average users is for them to go to monopolies such as Microsoft, Google, etc.
It's a serious social problem for at least two reasons: first, many people cannot afford costly software from these price-gouging monopolies; second, in more recent times these monopolies now sap users of all vestiges of their privacy as a condition of use of their products and users have no way of stopping the leakage.
The fact that governments haven't acted to break up these monopolistic practices and to stop the privacy violations is a disgrace. It's also a testament to the power of these mega corporations not to mention the sorry state of our democracies (in that corporations hold the ear of government better than does the populous).
OK, I've stated the bloody obvious that just about every thinking person in the open software movement is aware of so where does that leave us?
As there's no middle ground - that being either a choice of choosing from competing like products or software supplied by revenue-neutral cooperatives that would pay software programmers and then charge users a modest fee for their software, or both - then we're only left with two alternatives - the monopolies and open source software. (Here perhaps I should point out that I'm principally referring to key software that's universally used by all users, operating systems and such, Windows, MS Office, Gmail, etc.)
Before going further I must say I'm strongly in favor of open source software and use it where ever possible. So what's wrong with it? Nothing really except the situation above and, unfortunately, that is a big problem.
The principal driving force for the developers of open software is that it interests them or otherwise they wouldn't develop it. Moreover, for most, this self-interest overrides any magnanimous feeling or desire to improve the software lot for the multitudes (note, I'm not saying develops don't have a magnanimous streak I'm sure many do, it's just that self-interest always comes first, especially so in the absence of money/payment for their efforts).
To say this isn't the case simply denies or belies the facts, we wouldn't have so many versions of Linux if this weren't so. Similarly, software like Thunderbird, Firefox, LibreOffice and such would be much more user-friendly, instead, we see a never-ending stream of new features rather than sorting out issues with boring utilitarian features the lack of which drives both users and help desk people alike to utter distraction.
If you want an example of this then there's hardly a better instance than Thunderbird, I've been rialling against its problems and issues for years both here on HN and elsewhere, even with this latest release Thunderbird still lacks sensible ergonomic features that Eudora Mail had from the outset quite some decades ago!
Right, both your objectives and those of other open software users have been satisfied and that's fine - and you are not to blame, as everyone on the planet has self-interest at heart and that comes first.
The trouble is that the greater unwashed isn't often listened to - not at least until there's been an outcry for years. Moreover, this situation is more likely to prevail with open software as commercial operations have a financial incentive to fix problems (at least they usually do so for the most glaring and egregious of issues).
On the matter of having control over one's software I can only concur with you to the fullest extent. Over the many years I've been using software both professionally and for personal use the single biggest problem I've had is the lack of control that I've been able to exercise over the software.
Some would say that to solve these problems users should either write new programs from scratch and or recompile open software with suitable changes. Yes, it's one solution but hardly viable in many situations. As someone who programs, I'm only too well aware of the fact.
All that said, as I see it we are no nearer any realistic solution.
Well that's not my objective. If it's yours, then good luck with that battle. I'm okay ignoring users who don't want to put in the time necessary to become proficient in GNU/Linux. I mean sure it would be nice if there were some unified simple way to do things, but I personally wouldn't use a Linux-based OS that I don't like simply to decrease fragmentation. Basically the whole point of free software is that you _don't_ have to do that if you don't want to.
Regardless I wish you luck in all the development/community work you put into turning your vision into a reality.
C'est la vie.
> The greater objective is for everyone - normal users - to have a choice to select from a reasonable number of comparable competing products as they do with other products they're familiar with. This situation does not exist at present despite the fact that the computing industry has existed for over 75 years.
Sure it does: iOS, Android, Window, macOS, Linux. You're not complaining that there isn't a choice, you're complaining that the free choice isn't highly polished. Yes, it'd be nice if it were, but the fact that it isn't is just a logical consequence of the forces involved; it's like ranting that the sun rises in the east.
I was not implying that such a project be started at this late juncture as clearly what you said would be correct if it did.
Perhaps it's best to illustrate what I meant with an example (there are of course many variations on this theme). Had the seemingly dead-in-the-water project ReactOS had at its outset decades ago in 1996 charged a small sum of say $10 to $20 for its Windows-like compatible operating system sufficient to cover costs then by now we'd have a viable clone of Windows that Windows users would be very familiar with and actually use.
Right, in the broad sense Linux is also an alterative to Windows but even with Wine installed it's still a very difficult call for many Windows users - the proof thereof is in Linux's take up numbers - even after decades, Windows users haven't moved to it in sufficient numbers to bother speaking about.
If the ReactOS project had paid its developers a living wage from the outset then it's hard to believe that by now - over a quarter century on - that ReactOS wouldn't be a viable alterative to MS Windows.
Given the longstanding and continuing angst many users have with both Windows and Microsoft's profiteering monopoly, it stands to reason they would readily jump to a viable alterative if it were available, especially so if its price was cheap in comparison to Windows. Similarly, there'd be precious little difficulty in getting large numbers of talented developers - and many developers means a quick finish to the project (er well, at least a much quicker finish than the current haphazard arrangement has produced, as the project stands now it could be strongly argued that it's not much further ahead than when it first started).
Perhaps this is a bad example due to possible controversy but I think not, specifically because there are many, many users who are disgruntled with both Windows and MS. Furthermore, as much of ReactOS's development has taken place in Russia, I doubt that any potential cries of plagiarism and or of copyright breaches from Microsoft would hold water, as we're all tragically witnessing, Russia isn't too enamored with the US or helping its corperations not to mention the way it's protected Snowdon. Any objections from Microsoft would be further weakened if the project were to demonstrate openly that it enforced clean room code development.
There's a lot more I could mention about this matter but I'll leave it here for the moment.
https://www.opencode.net/dfn2/ocs-url/-/blob/master/docs/OCS...
WHY? Why would you ever do that? It is not "you are doing it wrong" it is "you are wrong for doing it at all". Even Windows got the memo and got win-get now....
99.9% of Windows users do not use win-get, and you know this. Stop pretending that bad UX is just the user being stupid.
I find it funny that people are perfectly fine using the appstore and not being able to just download apps from a website (easily) on mobile (amny even say it is a feature), but when it is not possible on desktop than it is somehow a massive usability issue that users never be able to adjust to (apart from the fact that MS and Apple also try to push you to their appstores).
There is an AppImage. It just works.
https://github.com/srevinsaju/thunderbird-appImage/
Try it.
And yes, IMHO, the Thunderbird organisation should distribute it.
sudo snap install thunderbird --candidate
And yeah, I think it is a mistake for the Thunderbird website to not guide people to the software center.
Now, if only I could sync accounts and configs between devices without a bodge of a workaround. That would be fantastic, especially with the new Android client.
I'm also very curious to their Matrix support. I've heard about it, and maybe this move from Thunderbird makes it more accessible.
Also, a reminder to self: donate some money to the Thunderbird development team.
Also I have a portrait monitor so not interested in getting rid of title-bars... better be able to keep them and not be forcing a widescreen layout.
Please let form follow function...
Edit: some other user pointed out that Maildir support is on the roadmap: https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap#maildir
Great news!!
My initial impression is that it is delightfully old-fashioned. It reminds me of the mail clients we used to use in the good old days - The list view has tiny fonts and is packed with all kinds of information. It isn't at all "slick" like Apple Mail or even Outlook.
It feels clunky, like it's an ancient codebase that's been redesigned a million times. But it's charming.
For what it's worth, I usually find myself trying both searching for something and if I don't find what I'm looking for, I resort to filtering. Maybe that's a clue for what confuses me.
Also, I think I don't know in which mail accounts it is searching (everywhere or the current one)?
And sometimes I _think_ it doesn't find things that are there and I find them differently.
> We suggest you leave Maildir disabled unless you are an advanced user, willing to risk your data, and know how to back up your email before turning on Maildir and how to restore it if you run into problems.
Have they fixed that or has other things like Matrix integration taken priority over email?
Thunderbird is a messaging/communications client, and way more people will benefit from Matrix support than would ever benefit from Maildir support.
Further, my understanding from the Thunderbird team's comms is that they are very much in control of their own destiny. I don't get the sense that Mozilla has much say in Thunderbird's roadmap (or even cares) at this point.
It's an email client.
Absolutely yes. Maildir support is a niche want, where as chat has become essential for many offices replacing email for most internal communication.
Additionally the chat fuctionality has been available in one form or another for years but has been quite neglected. They have just finally extended it and cleaned it up
You can keep logs from a Matrix server if you configure it to do so.
The mail store conversion feature is still behind an about:Config swatting, though.
Do you by chance know how to actually trigger the conversion after turning this flag on? I can't seem to find a way to do it.
Tools->Accounts->(your account)->Server Settings
Pardon?
That is not a word, and I can't guess.
To "cough up" is a thing (to pay belatedly or reluctantly) but I can't see how it would fit.
The default is 12px. The max appears to be 30px.
Changing font size only appears to change the UI font, not the message fonts, but it does appear to change all UI sections I tested. I saw increased font in the 5 major UI sections and the Settings section.
When setting size to 30px, the the email panes looks mediocre, but usable. The icons do not increase in size, but the bounding boxes for text areas do, so things lay out approximately correct. It's clear this is not yet fully supported.
The Address Book looks like garbage, and clearly has a layout bug. In the list of contacts, the selectable boxes around different contacts do not scale appropriately, and the text from one sits over the text from its neighbors. It functions properly, and the individual contact view is usable, so this may not be a deal breaker until its fixed.
The other sections I use (calendar & tasks) look fine. I do not have any chat accounts set up, so I cannot test that section.
Overall, I would rate it as a usable first step, but hopefully they do not consider it finished. As a minimum, icons need to scale with font sizes, and the padding between elements at high font size needs to scale, or at least have some breakpoints.
Ignore your application's serious usability issues for years at a time. But make a great fanfare about your new dark theme or the fact you've contributed to the further descent of the human race into moronic illiteracy, by adding more fucking emojis.
Another use in this thread suggested deleting .db, but ymmv
Nowadays I just run the default web app in Ferdium and use vdirsyncer to backup my mail and calendars to disk. And I use Evolution only because Gnome uses it for showing my events on the shell calendar. Like it or not Gmail (and Fastmail) interfaces are great and native PIM is dead.
typing my google password into a random popup isn't exactly confidence inspiring -- neither is the 'less secure apps' flow they invented
hard to set up threading, sync took forever before newest part of inbox was ready, unclear impact on how replies look
IMO it's 2022 and the open niche for email clients is 'offramp from gmail' -- how can I get a temporary gmail-like experience on desktop w/out an overnight sync, without a giant security hole, and with minimal changed experience. Solve this and you can eventually migrate people to other email hosting.
You can't have done that recently. Less Secure Apps was recently deprecated and removed. They've been actively discouraging using it for around 5 years. Thunderbird has supported the OAuth flow for Gmail since at least 2017 (I swear it's been there longer, but 2017 is the earliest reference I can find). It's used it as the default option when detecting Gmail since before COVID at least. It did promote the use of "Less Secure Apps" previously and that option was still available after the introduction of OAuth, but not as the default.
I no longer use Thunderbird (I switched to Spark, which solved a number of issues I was experiencing with unread email counts), but it's been a pretty good experience for a long time. Especially if you have multiple email accounts from different providers.
assumed they had just renamed it
Ability to read/reply if the internet is down or you are traveling outside of internet areas.
Easier and faster to make backups of your email and contacts.
More features than web email interfaces.
Haven't tried it again since then.