Thunderbird 78 is available on the Snap Store

https://snapcraft.io/thunderbird

by reimbar • 6 years ago

34 46 6 years ago

snapcraft.io

eznzt• 6 years ago

In case you're looking for a package of Thunderbird that takes a while to launch.

sgt3• 6 years ago

What's a while?

Spivak• 6 years ago

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."

aidenn0• 6 years ago

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.

Darmody4• 6 years ago

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.

abawany• 6 years ago

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.

pizza2342• 6 years ago

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)

fruffy• 6 years ago

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.

bayindirh6• 6 years ago

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.

ASalazarMX• 6 years ago

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.

topspin• 6 years ago

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?

kayson• 6 years ago

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.

progman32• 6 years ago

Latest thunderbird even works seamlessly for my work's wonky office 365 + 3rd party sso/2fa setup.

Darmody4• 6 years ago

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.

kd9137• 6 years ago

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.

mixmastamyk2• 6 years ago

That's actually good because they broke a few things in the latest Thunderbirds. I also prefer a faster startup.

Darmody4• 6 years ago

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.

bayindirh6• 6 years ago

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.

curt15• 6 years ago

Will this eventually replace the deb package, over which I have full control of updates?

pizza2342• 6 years ago

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.

bayindirh6• 6 years ago

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.

bayindirh6• 6 years ago

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.

mbushey• 6 years ago

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.

shaicoleman• 6 years ago

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

simion3143• 6 years ago

Thunderbird starts with my computer and I restart my computer maybe 2 times a week.

lokedhs2• 6 years ago

How's do you you deal with Firefox updates where it refuses to load any pages until you restart?

entropicdrifter• 6 years ago

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

sgt3• 6 years ago

My goodness, the Linux desktop is a mess! Tiny mouse cursor... that made me almost choke on my coffee from laughter.

Rolcol• 6 years ago

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.

wkearney99• 6 years ago

snap is a mess, no thanks.

Thunderbird 78 is available on the Snap Store

Related Stories