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Or just use the Flatpak version on Flathub, which doesn't take a ridiculous amount of time to launch
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.Thunderbird
Here's a performance and feature comparison between Flatpak and Snap with Firefox, for reference:
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/firefox-linux-flatpak-snap.html
My goodness, the Linux desktop is a mess! Tiny mouse cursor... that made me almost choke on my coffee from laughter.
I don't use Snaps myself, but Ubuntu did announce that they saw large speed improvements by switching the compression from XZ to LZO. The numbers they gave were for Chrome:
https://ubuntu.com/blog/snap-speed-improvements-with-new-com...
It made the Snap about 100MB bigger, though.
Thunderbird starts with my computer and I restart my computer maybe 2 times a week.
How's do you you deal with Firefox updates where it refuses to load any pages until you restart?
I click the restart button. It is annoying that it happens unexpectedly but not a big deal.
In case you're looking for a package of Thunderbird that takes a while to launch.
What's a while?
However long it takes (on your system) to extract and mount a squashfs on a loopback device, link, and run. Snap made an uhh.. odd architectural decision with that one.
The whole squashfs game doesn't actually buy you that much compression in practice but if you have slower CPU it will grind you to a halt. I think it's kinda weird they went this route since this dance seems mostly unrelated to the actual value of Snaps which is "here's your app self-contained-ish."
Could it perhaps be fixed by having some kind of Snap cache for frequently used apps? At the expense of a little disk space, but vastly improving load times.
Will this eventually replace the deb package, over which I have full control of updates?
This is actually a very critical concern, compared to other programs in general.
Thunderbird must have changed the WebExtensions APIs after v68 (based on what I see in the addons compatibility).
Several extensions in the top list by users, are not compatible with v78¹. Thunderbird snap users are literally going to wake up one day, and find that [some of] their extensions are not working anymore.
¹=
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/extensions/...
edit: Removed Lightning reference, as it's not 100% clear if it will be bundled with TB.
Lightning is bundled with 78. At least Debian's packages integrate that. I use a couple of online calendars with it and, it works very stable.
For Debian it's _almost certainly_ no. For Ubuntu, it's _possibly_ yes.
I'm not sure that it's too late to revolt against Snap in general but, as far as I can see, people don't care if it works somehow.
Ubuntu/Snap simply does not work anymore. The sandboxing blocks all access to remote shares. I run a ZFS NFS file server for my data, and snap is blocking this. I'm in the process of switching all my Linux machines over to Arch. Also on one of my Ubuntu machines Chrome, which is a snap, seqfaults on startup. To me, Ubuntu is dead/dying other than in a docker container.
snap is a mess, no thanks.
Look at your mounts, then disable snap.
Thunderbird is not the kind of app that should be snapped. We needed tools like snap for software that could be troublesome due incompatibilities with the system libraries or software by third parties who can't make sure their packages would work on any system.
Thunderbird has always worked great the way it was.
I'm so glad I'm not using Ubuntu anymore.
Are you kidding me?
Thunderbird and Firefox are perfect candidates for snap.
Before with Thunderbird, the only packaged version of thunderbird was an extremely old version released. Even now on 18.04 the package version of thunderbird is version 68.
To a certain degree the same nonsense happens with Firefox. The version of Firefox provided by apt lags behind for security releases.
In contrast, the snap version is now released almost the same day for ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04 and 20.10.
I'm glad to be using snaps and Ubuntu. Finally I can now get an easy installation for getting the latest version of intellij, vscode, firefox, thunderbird with no additional repos or faffle.
> Before with Thunderbird, the only packaged version of thunderbird was an extremely old version released. Even now on 18.04 the package version of thunderbird is version 68.
18.04 is a LTS release and it only contains ESR releases of Firefox and Thunderbird. Like Debian Stable.
Even Debian has Firefox 82 and Thunderbird 78 nowadays. They're intentionally kept at the unstable channel because they're updated a lot. Stable gets the ESR releases but, unstable gets the latest releases in 48 hours max.
> The version of Firefox provided by apt lags behind for security releases.
Firefox has a _Debian Exception_ which allows Debian to merge its well-tested security patches & hardening, and still publish it as Firefox with the original version number. This causes the 24-48 hour delays unless a patch breaks something. Even if it breaks something, you get the latest version at most a week later.
I won't even argue about the harms/disadvantages of Snaps and the forcing of them upon users by Canonical...
This comment is submitted with Firefox 82.0.2-1 obtained via official Debian repositories.
Yea but now those developers who are stuck on 18.04 (for IT reasons) can actually run/use the latest stable userland applications without having to break from the stability provided by the older OS? How is that bad? I don't want to be stuck on version 68 of Firefox/Thunderbird just like I wouldn't want to be using Chromium from 10 versions ago.
>I won't even argue about the harms/disadvantages of Snaps and the forcing of them upon users by Canonical...
Canonical only forced one snap and that was chromium... Everything else is still maintained as an apt package if required. They put a pretty well explained reasoning as to why it was forced. Namely that it was impossible to maintain the chromium package for 14.04 and older releases because they couldn't backport the compiler. Hence the option available to them was to remove the package or keep people supported using snap.
Not to mention that Chromium is still a Universe program and not officially supported at all. They didn't want to fork over the additional maintenance overhead which I am not gonna complain about.
Firefox and Thunderbird are not _wild_ applications in terms of dependencies. They're happy to work with whatever libraries you have on the system. I'm not sure Firefox 82 requires significantly newer versions of the libraries required by Firefox 68. It's same for Thunderbird.
In that case you have two choices. You can either use a PPA or just download the .tar.gz release and expand to a folder under your home folder. I did the second one a lot. In our system room we have a computer which runs CentOS 6 and used for mundane tasks. When I have to work there and have some extra time, I just get the latest Firefox release and untar under my home folder, and continue using that.
I'll have to go there tomorrow and will try Firefox 82 just for fun.
Canonical pushes its users a lot and, I always hear the same thing: "It's _just_ one package", It's well explained. No, just no. When I apt-get something, I expect an apt package. Not a silent install of snapd and and a snap, and a lot of under the hood tweaking to hide what they're doing.
If it's a universe package and it is _not supported at all_, why they're declaring it as a play pen and doing their testing on that? It's not supported, OK but, it's not declared for testing.
The problem with Snap is not the idea. It's centralization, it's trying to dominate the space, it's the silent pushing-forward and portraying it as the only way. No, it's not.
A lot of companies are pushing a lot of ideas because they like it internally and, they push it harder when they experience pressure because, they see themselves the only people with the _right opinions_ and it benefits them to dominate the space.
I already don't like Canonical because of a lot of things but, they're becoming the thing they wanted to dethrone. The bugzilla's #1 bug was Microsoft's domination and they're just trying to their tactics and, integrating to anything they were against, _because money_.
With their every action, I move one step further away from them.
>In that case you have two choices. You can either use a PPA or just download the .tar.gz release and expand to a folder under your home folder. I did the second one a lot. In our system room we have a computer which runs CentOS 6 and used for mundane tasks. When I have to work there and have some extra time, I just get the latest Firefox release and untar under my home folder, and continue using that.
You missed the third/fource/fifth choice provided by both Canonical, RedHat and Mozilla who has decided to offer Firefox/Thunderbird as a snap/flatpak. A version that is actually confined and restricted with apparmor/mounted namespaces/seccompf filters.
>Canonical pushes its users a lot and, I always hear the same thing: "It's just one package", It's well explained. No, just no. When I apt-get something, I expect an apt package. Not a silent install of snapd and and a snap, and a lot of under the hood tweaking to hide what they're doing.
No it's only for chromium, everything else will obey and use the package manager if requested.
>If it's a universe package and it is not supported at all, why they're declaring it as a play pen and doing their testing on that? It's not supported, OK but, it's not declared for testing.
They stated clearly why they moved it to snap. Chromium is a popular common browser which people use for banking. They can't just leave people to use the old chromium browser.
Their option was to forcefully remove chromium or move people to the snap.
>The problem with Snap is not the idea. It's centralization, it's trying to dominate the space, it's the silent pushing-forward and portraying it as the only way. No, it's not.
Yea and they heard the same nonsense from people talking about launchpad years ago. They spent a considerable amount of engineering effort to open source it and nobody else was running the infrastructure because it's suprisingly complex and expensive to run. They received no PRs whatsoever for considerable engineering cost and effort.
Snap is dependent on Canonical infra, and considering how Mint, POP_OS and others all use their infra. Nobody else will be running their infra.
They also have experience from PPAs where the most common PPA being used on offer was a abandoned oracle java package that was provided by some random 3rd party. That PPA has root access to hundreds of thousands of machines and can upload any random package and have it execute. Does that sound like sensible security policy at all?
>I already don't like Canonical because of a lot of things but, they're becoming the thing they wanted to dethrone. The bugzilla's #1 bug was Microsoft's domination and they're just trying to their tactics and, integrating to anything they were against, because money.
This is the root of the problem. Canonical has done a lot for the FOSS community. GNU desktop linux would be way behind without them and yea I agree they have some missteps. They are still a lot better than the majority of the community, majority of companies out there and have done a lot to support the FOSS community. They made one of the most usable distros out there and is still one of the most popular Linux OSes out there.
People just love to hate them because they don't follow their ideal 'perfect' FOSS company. I'm glad snap exists, I'm glad competition exists and I hope they continue to succeed.
How's that an argument?
If they are stuck with Thunderbird 68 is because they don't want to update it. Same thing can happen with snap. If they don't work on it, you won't have the latest version.
The amount of development resources and effort needed to build publish and release the snap is a lot less than the apt. No need to interact with bzr, much easier to update in the snap store compared with repos.
Snaps are built against one version, they easily integrate into CI pipelines (unlike launchpad/bzr) and you don't need to worry about things like outdated compiler versions (for releases on 18.04/16.04/14.04).
I know because I helped with the CI builds of Firefox for snap.
But again, bzr and launchpad are their own tools. If they are bad it's not an argument for snap.
Other distros have their packages updated very quickly without snap.
> But again, bzr and launchpad are their own tools. If they are bad it's not an argument for snap.
This logic makes no sense whatsoever. If the previous tools are cumbersome and bad, and Canonical releases a new mechanism that is easier to develop/use/release. How the hell is that not an argument for the new mechanism?
What is this logic?
Nevermind that this new process is already integrated into several CI pipelines at Microsoft, VLC, Mozilla, Google, Amazon, JetBrains, KDE and Spotify.
That's actually good because they broke a few things in the latest Thunderbirds. I also prefer a faster startup.
Then fine, run sudo snap revert to go back to a hopefully older stable build/revision. Certainly a better as an option than going back to version 68.
Also I don't really care about startups when the difference is on the order of 1-5 seconds. It is not the dominant factor in my boot times. The slowest aspect for me is still typing passwords. Services which are waiting for online for network interface also take longer.
> _Then fine, run sudo snap revert_
No. The solution shouldn't be on users to learn another package management system beyond what the OS already provides.
It's not beyond what the OS provides? Snap is a part of ubuntu?
The CLI interface for snap I find is a lot more intuitive than flatpak.
Also what rights do you have to become the UX arbiter here?
68 is the last non-broken version.
Do people actually use Thunderbird still? Every single time I've tried it, it has been a terrible experience. For GUI mail clients I tend to swing between evolution and claws. Evolution does all the fancy stuff (html e-mail, seemless integration of calendar invites, outlook support) way better than Thunderbird and claws does all the workhorse stuff way better than Thunderbird (flexible mail fitering, organization, &c.).
Meanwhile Thunderbird has corrupted my inbox 3 times in a sum total of about 3 years of me using it spread out over a decade, crashes more than evolution, and does the core messaging features worse than claws.
I use Thunderbird on three computers continuously, and manage three IMAP accounts.
I'm possibly using it more than 15 years as of today and it never corrupted a mailbox or lost any mail. Its filters are top notch and it has one of the best and fastest spam filtering as I've seen.
One of the same accounts on Thunderbird is also managed via KMail on my (personal) workstation and I love some features of KMail too but, it doesn't feel as fast and nimble. I keep KMail because of its KDE & Akonadi integration (it continues to process mail even if KMail is not running).
At the end of the day, Thunderbird is an awesome E-mail client. It does everything and doesn't crash even if I leave it open for weeks. 78 integrates lightning so, calendars are well integrated and works flawlessly for me too.
I've also did some enterprise integration work on Thunderbird and it has some nice flexibility options under the hood.
However I need to note that (in my case) all systems it communicates with are UNIX servers (Sendmail, Postfix, Dovecot, et. al).
Of course, YMMV.
I do, and on multiple machines! Never got any corruption, but that's of course anecdata - also, I don't use the global search/index.
I personally don't think it's so terrible - ultimately, the email medium itself hasn't evolved for... never.
Definitely the address book is garbage in any possible way (both in the UX, and in the legendary Mork backend) - one has to use addons in order to get a sane experience.
Additionally, AFAIK, it's so internally tangled that after years, they couldn't make a tabbed email writing window. Another indicative bit: "Plans existed for Mork to be replaced with MozStorage in Thunderbird 3.0."¹.
My biggest worry was actually the addons. There has been a major API change at some point, and several of my addons weren't compatible. Took years for equivalent ones to be developed. Now... another API change (sigh).
¹:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)
I only use Thunderbird on all my devices for all my different email addresses. No other client. Happy with it. Also works nicely for dual-booting and sharing a config between Windows and Linux.
One feature I miss is sync. Something like Firefox Sync would be very useful.
> Do people actually use Thunderbird still?
Heavily for the past 13 years. Never corrupted a mailbox. I've had to reindex a mailbox once or twice to get search working, but that was many years ago.
I recalling having a problem with excessive CPU use after it's been running awhile (weeks to months.) That seems to have gotten solved at some point; I looked into the problem a bit (strace, etc.) and found the IO multiplexing (select, poll, epoll, whatever) code was spinning. Solution was to bounce it.
My only complaint now is that dark mode isn't fully hammered out. At least not in the non-snap version available in bionic beaver. Anyone know if newer versions have got this right yet?
I've been using Thunderbird for more than 15 years without experiencing inbox corruption. Granted, the first years the volume of mail was low compared to now.
About 5 years ago I tried other clients, including Evolution and Claws, and stayed with Thunderbird. Evolution's UI was significantly slower than Thunderbird's, Claws and the others were less functional.
I'm really happy Thunderbird development was rekindled, because it was getting noticeably behind. I manage six emails, two calendars and three USENET accounts with it, all in the same application, fast, and using less RAM than it takes GMail to display one inbox.
I use it on all (edit)applicable platforms available to me and also make tiny financial contributions to the project. Sure it has some imperfections but as a product that does "all of the things" (email, calendar (CalDAV), contacts (CardDAV), etc.) and open source - imo, it deserves support. I reported some bugs on the 68.x(edit: oops, 78.x) release and their response was prompt, professional, and helpful. I love Thunderbird.
I've been using Thunderbird exclusively for at least 15 years with no problems. Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, and Namecheap's hosted email service all work great via IMAP.
I've been using it for a decade, at home and at work. The only problem I had with it is that sometimes it keeps asking for the hotmail password.
Latest thunderbird even works seamlessly for my work's wonky office 365 + 3rd party sso/2fa setup.