There is of course a flood of negative comments...
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!
I too have enjoyed Thunderbird for a long time. It's lightweight and fast which is a big plus for me. It makes showing people how to encrypt their emails very easy. The only thing missing and there is probably an addon for this is a sync with Fastmail's aliases and sending identities to give it the same composing pull-down as their web interface. I sometimes forget to manually set the "From:" to the correct alias.
I've been using Thunderbird since 2009 and while I really like it, I wouldn't call it lightweight and fast: it's pretty slow to start, takes quite a lot of memory and the search feature is really slow.
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)
Could I make a recommendation (feel free to ignore it).
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.
After dropping all caches on my system, Thunderbird 102 starts in 3 seconds flat. Yes it's not lightning fast, but it's loading my office e-mails which contains 15 years of e-mails at this point.
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.
How is 3 seconds slow? Gmail web client takes more than three seconds these days.
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.
My wife actually hates gmail and has used Thunderbird as her email UI for years. Recently we ditched Google for her work domain and moved email hosting to another provider. Thunderbird has protected her from that change - she basically didn't notice. The only difference to her is that she's using K-9 on her phone instead of the Gmail app.
I've tried thunderbird multiple times and the upgrades look good so I'm going to try it again. But there's an issue I haven't ever clearly figured out. How do I integrate gmail properly? I love how much easier it was to setup this time, but how do I get the folders integrated? (Primary, social, promotions, updates, forums) Gmail is already sorting this for me but it is way too much to just view everything all at once. Forums and social are showing up automatically but not the others.
Also, I know people use a lot of addons. Are there any that I should look into?
Are you using Thunderbird IMAP to synchronize with Gmail? IMAP lets you select which remote folders you want synchronized on the client. Maybe check your Gmail account in Thunderbird settings, find the IMAP section, and make sure all the Gmail folders you want to sync are enabled.
I am using IMAP. I don't see this option that you're talking about. FWIW, all my custom folders loaded correctly. It is just that don't see that top bar[0], except for social and forums (my least used ones).
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)
The idea to use special filter is a good one, but as others stated the 'top bar' isn't a real thing in email. Maybe some sort of IMAP extension, but it's a bit like asking how to put onenote into a Google doc - you might find some workaround but you are looking at two different things.
I don't use those folders, I also don't use a local email client these days...
I'm in the same boat. I have to use Outlook for work, but I use TB for pretty much everything else (and still import my work cal to make sure I have a 'master' view of all my time since I work from home mostly anyway).
It's punchy, has decent (not awesome) UX, is easy to set up, and doesn't act like a memory leak with a UI.
Yes, precisely. I rely on Thunderbird every single day, which is why I froze it at version 60-something (rolling back about four years) after the upgrades kept breaking it and mangling the appearance for me and the other people in my company.
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.
>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.
Thunderbird has had XMPP and other chat for many, many years now.
Like I said, 0.8% of users. Slack and discord and maybe the MS product are what matter in the chat space. If you're not offering that then the dev resources would probably be better funnelled into bug chasing and UI consistency.
'It supports XMPP' that's great. ICQ support would arguably be more useful.
I don’t know about Slack, but discord’s terms of service explicitly forbid external chat clients. It’s also proprietary, like Slack I believe. Maybe we should try and encourage more use of open protocols over things like Discord or Slack.
I've seen multiple people be banned from using this client. It does everything in its power to remain unnoticed but you only need to come across the wrong server-side detection update once to get the hammer.
Good to know and unfortunate although not terribly surprising. I guess this is the recommended user experience that the commenter up the thread is suggesting be integrated into thunderbird?
There were some automated bans that happened after an outage (years ago), but those bans got lifted. After that, I haven't seen anyone get banned for using Ripcord. But like all things, YMMV. The benefits of Ripcord outweigh the negatives for me.
Yes. It is. It's been confirmed multiple times that even using browser plugins that interact with the Discord client code in any way counts, in their opinion, as a "third party client".
And what percent of users use iCal, carddav and imap? Matrix is the most popular open chat protocol. Seems like your angling for Exchange and Slack support. Yeah, no thanks.
>And what percent of users use iCal, carddav and imap?
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 use only SMTP and POP3, no calendar. Chat: Slack (work) and WhatsApp plus Telegram.
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.
I check mail on my phone with K9 (configured to leave messages on server,) possibly answer BCCing myself and eventually download mail forever on my laptop and remove from server.
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.
Can you show me where to opt in, and where this is documented? The only stats I can find that are close to the number provided are for total registered users.
I wouldn't be so sure. If you create a Matrix account and join an IRC channel, your username[m] will never leave the channel, even if you never use Matrix again. I made a few test accounts and it was rather difficult to figure out how leave IRC channels properly if you decide not to use Matrix anymore.
Why do we even need chat in an email app? It just adds bloat and slowness for not discernible reason. This is why I WONT be using apps like Thunderbird any time soon.
I've been using TB for many years. It's not ideal, but when I've been looking to replace it - I returned to it every time. Much better UX than Outlook.
I don't need chats and other stuff though. Maybe better Exchange support (because the corporate world loves it, sigh).
Hah, same, but it's also excellent for integrating with any of the popular e-mail platforms out there (weird custom non-standard folders on some aside) and even acting as a calendar or an RSS reader.
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 have been in the company 10 years... so its changed a few times.
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.
Heh thanks for the info. I was just trying the Office 365 IMAP directly, and for my organization Thunderbird is blocked. I looked around to see if I could easily modify it's Application Id (I mean, it's just telling the server what it is...) but could only find instructions for Evolution. Maybe that's something they will add at some point...
The plugin worked well for some time for me, but support is really bad. I once had an issue, where the OWA page would require me to log in again, but of course they f'ed up their login to require JS and that JS did not run in Thunderbird (does any?). The plugin then only showed me the login page. When I contacted them, I basically got a shoulder shrugg as an answer, close to "Ah that's bad for you.". Then a while ago my e-mail account in Thunderbird simply disappeared and I still have no idea why and am assuming the plugin had a bug, which deleted the account from my Thunderbird. Haven't put any effort in yet to get it back working and am using IMAP, unable to confirm calendar events and such, because Outlook also wont load in Firefox for me. Good job ...
IMAP works out of the box with O365/Exchange and it supports oauth login which MS requires for most new accounts I believe. Calendar sync needs a plugin as far as I know.
An emotional need to cancel out complaints is classic toxic positivity.
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 would ask you to re-read my post please. I posted in the interest of balance, and when I did most of the og comments were negative, the top voted one being from someone who had never installed thunderbird and didn't know how to use a package manager.
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 ;)
> One of the core philosophies behind the development of Thunderbird 102 was doing more with less.
> ...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.
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.
"Email is dying" - one of those statements folks keep making while the number of email messages sent/received each year continues to grow.
There's a lot wrong with email protocols (it's still stupidly easy to craft very convincing phishing emails, and most junk filters are dangerously bad), but what's the alternative for the most common use cases? There's no other protocol where you can just hand over or publish your address in order to receive important/ structured/persistent information from another party. It doesn't require signing up to some single proprietary messaging platform and the fact it's existed for 50 years gives reasonable confidence it will still be around in another 50.
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.
Well the solution to old email protocols is JMAP, which Fastmail supports. But it's going to probably take time until JMAP support really picks up with both mail providers and client developers.
Based on what I've read from RFC8620, their approach is quite smart. It's basically turning email protocol into a set of HTTP RPCs, thus shifts all the transport-related technical problems away.
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.
The only "improvement" to HTTP I'm aware of is HTTP/2, which is just plain retarded.
HTTP/3 is the same thing but implemented correctly, and is barely used at all.
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.
What do you mean by "more real-time"? Email is instant, unless you have a SEG in front of your server scanning everything. Do you want email to be chat? If so, I'd say maybe you don't really understand email.
The exchange protocol is like CORBA and the US tax system got together and had a baby. You’d also need an exchange server to test it with, and running an exchange server isn’t trivial.
The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me. There was always something that didn't sync, didn't get detected, or wasn't supported.
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.
Honest question: is exchange support still relevant nowadays?
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.
I've always used Exchange support to include Exchange Online support and yes that's very important. I would switch to Thunderbird the day they announced full Exchange support.
Office365 is pretty much just Exchange underneath. And tons of larger orgs still use on-prem Exchange. Microsoft just announced the next version of on-premise Exchange for launch in 2024.
As cloud costs ratchet up and the weaknesses become more apparent, I suspect you'll see orgs start migrating back away from the cloud.
Unfortunately yes. Some organizations (like mine) use Office365 and disable IMAP/SMTP, so the only way to interface to the mail server is via Exchange :(
You'd be surprised. In certain sectors, companies prefer to keep as little as possible of their sensitive information in the cloud, emails included. Running their own exchange server is a common way to do that.
This. I've been looking for a new Exchange client since Outlook Web stopped properly supporting Firefox. I reached immediately for Thunderbird, but switched away quickly because of the need to pay for (somewhat clumsy) Exchange integration. If Owl were free, I wouldn't mind the long delays or weird synchronization issues. As a subscription service, I'll take my business elsewhere.
What specific long delays or weird synchronization issues do you experience? I just bought the plugin but don't notice any yet with ~7000 mails.
Did you find a good alternative? I read above that using DavMail as a proxy can also work.
OWA has a known issue with Firefox on Linux where it incorrectly believes that Ctrl is pressed while typing an email. This results in frequent missed characters and spurious actions, including moving focus to the search bar, archiving messages, saving the current message as a draft and closing it, etc. This makes OWA extremely frustrating to use. Another issue with OWA is the unhelpful completions (which I've noted before on HN), which in my experience seem to be related to the spurious actions (more suggested completions = more spurious actions)
To be fair, Matrix is a very email-like protocol. I think it makes sense to have it in an email client, especially if you're going to have RSS feeds as well.
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.
It makes sense in the context of the program being a spinoff of the Netscape suite (or early Mozilla suite) which had multiple parts including the browser. After all this program still has a NNTP client jammed in it, adding matrix is simply a matter of modernizing what was already there (the original IRC client).
A few months ago I was tasked with switching our office from Gmail's web interface to Thunderbird and it's gone surprisingly well. Usually new software meets a lot of resistance and complaints from the staff, but I've heard mostly praise.
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.
We haven't tried... our office is small enough that we just use paper calendars, and rarely need to arrange meetings or other events beyond a few people.
Even if I had merely one e-mail account, I would make the switch, because Thunderbird is simply no BS and 10 times faster to work with, once you know what you are doing.
Yes, kind of. We had been using a super janky forwarder setup to pass emails sent to our domain on to gmail accounts. We had some issues with it and I finally convinced the management to switch to actual email accounts. (Yes, I know there are pitfalls associated with using hosted email that isn't Gmail or Outlook in 2022.)
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.
Thunderbird is finally paying attention to the UI side of things. Hopefully they finally implement the standard multiline email list view which has been on the back burner for 19 years XD
> Thunderbird is finally paying attention to the UI side of things
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).
I'm fine with little UI tweaks. I'm not a fan of how the UI is becoming "flatter" with every release, and I wish they had toggles for some of the more questionable features (like those recipient bubbles which can't be easily edited, or the absolutely inane treatment of TO/CC/BCC).
If you don't want your software to change, don't update it.
The way Thunderbird looks and the messages list is a large part of it is horrendous and is a deal breaker for me, for example.
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.
For your purposes I'll keep it simple and just say "about 99.9% yes". Trust the word of a seasoned veteran - keep email clients, browsers and OSes up to date.
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.
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!
Even if they add it, the single-line display will always be around. It isn't mutually exclusive by any means. All clients that support multiline also have single-line support.
Nope. Mail.app removed it long ago. iOS mail has never had it. Even gmail is less info-dense than it could be, as it routinely increases the padding and margins for each message, even with the most dense view.
I love the new look, and Matrix, as far as I'm concerned is the only true alternative to Email with its fully open protocol, open source server and multitude of clients! Absolutely great move, and it looks great too!
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!
That just boggles my mind. I worked for an ecommerce company in 1998 and told them they should just use S/MIME instead of some bullshit proprietary encryption mechanism they used with their messaging client. It just works. But 24 years later encrypted email is still a mess.
It is if you’re interested in the identity of the human due to the administrative costs. Email providers could issue subscriber certs for every registered address pretty trivially.
The biggest UX hurdle is handling the private keys.
Considering how macOS/iOS will start synchronizing Webauthn tokens, I don't think S/MIME would be that difficult really. Email-validated certificates would be a nice start, but even those are expensive right now.
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.
I helped deploy a Verisign affiliate in Australia that had planned to do just that. I believe the post office was going to be the registration authority to vet users identity, and then there was going be some mechanism to issue a subscriber certificate from there, maybe on a smart card. This was 20 years ago, no idea how far it got.
The physical security they built into the facility housing the root CA was pretty intense.
Trying to use Thunderbird in the corporate world was frustrating - but just for two reasons:
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.
I found that #1 occurred for all events as they rolled forwards, so, for example, if the event occurred every Wednesday and the first one was in January, I will get a popup for today's meeting, but I will not be able to dismiss it on TB - I'd have to use my phone to delete the current event once it had passed to stop the nagging.
It’s projects like these that continue to make it feasible to run an entirely open source productivity stack. And that is very important, or a proprietary internet will become the only Internet.
> 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.
Me too! The lack of maildir was one of three reasons I moved to Evolution. Boring backup tools would generate a huge incremental any time I used Thunderbird.
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!
I took this as a reminder to finally set up Thunderbird for my work email.
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.
And I thought outlook (live.com)'s spam filtering was bad. It just doesn't seem like it should be that hard of a problem to solve - there's almost no case as a human I can't instantly tell that an email is spam or not-spam and give a concrete reason why. E.g. almost any email that uses my real name in the greeting isn't spam, and certainly one that's a reply to an email I've sent, yet I've seen examples of both end up in junk folders. It's distinguishing important emails specifically written to me providing key info or requiring my response vs mass-email or automatically generated email that I would think is a harder problem, but live.com seems to do it moderately well. If Thunderbird does auto categorization well that'd be reason enough to try it out (but where does the categorization execute, if you're using it from multiple devices?)
I supposed they don't feel very confident about the UI. When I looked at the Nightly a couple of weeks ago, the UI experience inside tha Matrix features was horrible. I hope this has been fixed/will be fixed soon.
I downloaded Thunderbird just to play with Matrix integration, and I think this is the right answer. The rest of the UI looks much more refreshed and new, and the Matrix window feels a lot closer to older IRC apps than anything else. Not that it's a problem, just an observation, but I would prefer it looks a little newer and fresher, personally.
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.
I'm surprised that davmail is not mentioned more often when talking about exchange support. It's an exchange to imap/caldav/LDAP translator, so you just run it in the background and connect to a local running server. It works very well in my experience (much better than exchanges IMAP support which has been extremely flaky for me).
Exchange does support IMAP, and it works well with Thunderbird. A lot of administrators like to disable it though, but you can't lay the blame for that on Microsoft. You can still use proxies for Exchange's protocol to IMAP and use Exchange with Thunderbird that way. The last time I did this it worked quite well, but does take a bit of time to set up.
It's quite strange to see IMAP/SMTP disabled like that, especially with 2FA having been available in Thunderbird for ages now. I'm guessing it's paranoia and not being up to date with IMAP's extensions over the years.
IMAP supports OAuth2 and if you set up an IMAP account in Thunderbird for a Google/Microsoft account, you get a standard OAuth2 popup with all the bells and whistles.
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.
You can do 2FA with IMAP, it's the standard setup nowadays in Thunderbird for Gmail, and I've set up an O365 account that way too. You can use OAuth as the auth method and have it work that way.
Just look at all the specialisation they had to add to work with GMail's "interpretation" of OAuth2 under threat of regular app passwords being removed by Google.
Exchange is a server you might want to connect to with its proprietary protocol. Thunderbird is only a client and Mozilla already makes it work on Windows. What would Microsoft have to do to support it that's not already done by Mozilla?
Outlook might be bad, but I also don't think Thunderbird is worth the $200 in yearly Owl subscription fees (with their per account and per device licensing) it'd cost me to make the switch :)
I really appreciate the Thunderbird development team for proactively going through the list of add-ons and reaching out to the add-on developers if there is any concern to be addressed before moving the add-ons to 102. I can feel the commitment to keep Thunderbird a great email client.
But does it have support for smartkeys? You know, like it use to prior to thunderbird 78. Huge regression dropping support for enigmail plugin and gnugpg for some built in solution that's half complete and as far as I'm aware doesn't support smartcards like yubikey. So crummy.
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.
I had to switch to evolution for my work computer because the company uses Exchange accounts and at least with the setup we have, it's not supported in Thunderbird on Linux. Supposedly there's a paid add-on that does this, but even if I was willing to pay for it, I wouldn't know beforehand if it actually works.
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.
Really nice to see a new matrix client. I was never able to get the hang of the discord UX, I think treating chat “channels” as email threads might be easier for me to grok, now I just need to find some matrix communities to join…
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.
Unusable Address Book. For me horizontal view is essential and now it's borked, ie. all email addresses lumped together as Email Addresses and the same for Phone Numbers and Addresses. How can this possibly be touted as an improvement? For me it's exactly the opposite. Columns are no longer resizable and the Notes section, which I rely on heavily, has been reduced in size YET AGAIN. Mozilla, there's an old adage - If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It. Switching back to 91 immediately and looking to disable updates.
I tried TB once a year or two ago - it was slow and the GUI was hard to read (maybe the same design worked on lower resolutions?) I completely forgot what I used in the 2000s, it could have been TB. A month ago, I gave it another shot. Not slow, GUI still hard to read, but at least there is a nice theme I found that now makes it usable ("Monterail Full Dark" is what I use). With that, I decided to stick with TB; it feels very comfortable and feels better than jumping into all the different webmail clients for various email addresses I have. I am curious to see what 102's UI re-design will bring.
I'm on an Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop computer. I click on the big green Free Download button. It downloads a .tar.bz2 file. I double-click on that in the Firefox download manager. It opens the Gnome archive extractor. I'm looking at... .gif files? .so files? I see something called "thunderbird" and another thing called "thunderbird-bin". I double-click on those and some other dialog pops up that says "No applications found for 'thunderbird'".
Will desktop Linux ever solve these basic usability problems?
Or will this always just be user error! you're doing it wrong!
It blows my mind how many comments here think you are wrong. You are absolutely correct. A new user does not care how great x,y,z feature is if they can't do basic things that are ubiquitous in other operating systems. New users might hear Unix is better, but if it doesn't feel that way, they're going to go back to what they know works when the next deliverable/project/essay/game comes out.
> New users might hear Unix is better, but if it doesn't feel that way, they're going to go back to what they know works
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)."
The problem is deb files don’t work on all distros and browsers tend to hide the specific distro from the user agent for privacy.
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.
The problem is flatpack/appimage are equally bad/opaque, they solve one problem at the expense of being better off just in windows or osx.
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.
> If you download a .deb file on Ubuntu, click on it, it will install it
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™.
“It will never be updated” is a property that is just as true/false on Windows or Mac applications. What do people do? They build self updated into their programs!
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.
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.
[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.
I believe the GUI-based DEB installed was removed from recent Debian/Ubuntu versions. You can of course install it from the CLI but that's terrible from a user experience point of view.
If Linux distros implemented every feature "new users" wanted then you would end up with something nearly identical to ChromiumOS (and those same users would probably just run ChromeOS.) If you want that then go run that.
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.
This isn't just a feature, this is installing apps. Many users are failing to install apps. Users on this forum, even, which is telling because this forum is a sort of filter to select those who are more tech savy than the average person. There is a usability issue here that absolutely should be talked about and addressed, which involves a solution that isn't "switch to chrome OS".
I would hazard a guess that many users on this forum are really only familiar with macOS and a smattering of CLI magical invocations.
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.
> There is a usability issue here that absolutely should be talked about and addressed
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.
I think we're assuming that if an application ever wants to be "mainstream", it has to be useable by people who don't know what a command line is, let alone what "sudo" means.
I'm not sure why it matters. In discussions like this there seems to be the assumption that Linux must be usable by non-technical people, and if it isn't, then someone is doing something wrong.
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 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?
Yeah... I know the tactic and you want me to go for a hunt of some comment somewhere. Otherwise it's a dismissal.
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.
> Who is this strawman entity who "wants Linux to be mainstream" ? Does anyone really care?
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.
It's not market forces conspiring against you, it's nature. You're not making the system simpler, just building more systems inside it.
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.
I guess I don't buy this - there are systems which offer a lot of freedom and are still popular.
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.
I'd prefer if I could use a single OS for most of my needs instead of having to context switch between platforms.
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.
Oh you know what I mean. "Mainstream" distros have GUIs that wrap package managers. Also my girlfriend figured apt out like a week after installing a debian based distro. It's not exactly rocket science.
This is at least partly on Thunderbird’s end. The more user friendly thing to do these days would be to distribute packages for each distro, which would behave a lot more like you’re expecting.
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…
This problem is largely solved via flatpak. The link can download a small config file that tells your software installer gui where to grab the package. It then installs and updates like you’d expect any app.
Software does need to stop linking to these tar files.
Personally i'd rather download a tarball with the binaries, put the program in a directory of my choice and if needed install the necessary libraries from my distro's package manager. So i wouldn't like it if programs stopped distributing those.
They surely have their own technical problems, but AppImages that maintain themselves are particularly friendly as 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.
AppImages still dynamically link to libc. They don't work on Alpine and Android. They'll probably break on distros that are built years apart from when the AppImage is too.
Just stop distributing binaries, it's unprofessional.
If your family members need binaries of bleeding edge software and you're worried about their ability to use their computer you should be building them. In that case you'll be able to ensure compatibility. I don't think encouraging novice users to download random binaries from the web is any better than them not being able to use the absolute latest version of an email client.
Exactly, figuring out how to make an exe on Linux is a step backwards, not forward...
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...
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.
And Thunderbird could just as well give you a .deb file if you're browsing from Ubuntu or a link to whatever software library your distro uses.
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.
The equivalent would be for Thunderbird to link a .zip file for windows users, which is actually a pretty damn common way to distribute software (or at least it use to be) so that you don't need to be an admin to use it, and would have the exact same feature of having random dynamic libraries and stuff like that sitting in the folder.
My experience is that tarballs and RPMs are most common. Regardless there's a lot more diversity in how things are packaged on Linux than on Windows or OSX.
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.
Both macOS and windows made the choice to make programs mostly self contained things that can be just dragged in.
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.
When you download a tarball from the internet containing an application, usually (unless they messed up/don't know what they're doing) that means most if not all dependencies are fully contained in that archive, except for things you can't really do that for, like libc. The point of a tarball is to avoid the system package manager, which makes it easier to reach more distros at the cost of an increased risk it simply won't work on some systems (due to missing system libraries or different versions).
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.
> 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.
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.
I think you are doing this wrong. If I want to install some software on linux, I install it from my distro's package repository or I compile it myself. There's no reason to expect different linux distros to have binary compatibility. This isn't closed-source software on a backwards-compatable ABI like on windows, there's no reason to install binaries from an unsigned source.
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
What's truly astounding is that Windows and Mac have developed their own Linux like distribution managers over the years indicating it's probably far better than the proprietary crap they created in the first place.
It is astounding that you think phones need you to join a "cool, secret club". Open app store, click install is not new, not secret and much easier than download stuff from websites to sideload.
I think the prudent thing to do would be to replace the "Download Thunderbird" button with a "Get Thunderbird" one which has instructions for how to get it via distro repos at least for Ubuntu/Fedora (and maybe flatpak/snap if they endorse them?), alongside a "Download for manual installation" which replicates the current behavior.
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?
This mindset is why Linux will always have basic usability problems.
> 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.
On ubuntu you open Software, search thunderbird, and click the install button. Or you open the terminal and type sudo apt-get install thunderbird.
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?
Imagine if the web worked like that: You couldn't click a link that takes you where you wanna go, instead it's "essential computing knowledge" that you must open a separate tab, type the name of the other page you wanted into a search box and find the page you were looking for on the results page.
Why is it so hard to have a button that installs Thunderbird?
On a brand-new linux desktop, I click the terminal icon and run the following command:
`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.
If you expect Linux to be like macOS, you can only be disappointed.
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.
> 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.
This RMS-style ideological "free software movement" is a tiny minority of the people who actually use, work on, or care about software like Linux. It's best to just ignore them.
I sort of read the OPs message ironically.
The OPs point is that this stuff is broken compared to how a Windows or Mac user would do things.
Windows/Mac users just click download, and double click. Linux could get to the same spot (more or less) by using Flatpak. I think that has to be the answer here. It's absurd to expect a developer to build their app for a dozen different distros.
> 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
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.
So do I wget the big green Free Download link instead of click on it? Do I then cd to my Downloads folder and tar xf on the file? And then I cd into the extracted directory and ./thunderbird?
User has no business in learning anything about file systems. This is basic UX error and one of many cuts, which are keeping Desktop Linux on its 1% market share.
The easiest and best way for you (you'll get updates through signed packages, etc) is probably to install via the Ubuntu Software Center.
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.
>The easiest and best way for you (you'll get updates through signed packages, etc) is probably to install via the Ubuntu Software Center.
Even that aspect is a confusing mess. On a Ubuntu Desktop installation, click on the 'Show Applications' icon in the dock and you'll see icons for:
* 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!
I don't use unbuntu. But doesn't it's software centre always try to push you to snaps? Or can this be disabled. Last thing I would want is snap variants.
Moving to Snaps gets us to a world of sandboxed applications, defined permissions, and OS version independence. That's the world that exists on mobile, and it's pretty great. Shouldn't desktop learn from mobile's successful experiment in sandboxing?
They should, that's why Flatpak is excellent for wide-spread, cross-distro software support.
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.
This thread is a perfect example of why we don't have clarity on what kind of distribution management we should have. We had:
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.
Nobody knows what kind of management we should have. Some people prefer directly distributing executables (AppImage). Some people prefer packages like Android/iOS (Flatpak). Some people prefer compressed files with installer scripts, like Microsoft's MSI files (.deb/.rpm). Some people prefer just a flat folder with binaries they can plonk down anywhere.
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.
> That's the world that exists on mobile, and it's pretty great.
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 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 have no interest in snaps, flatpak or appimage. I can't stop my phone's apps from updating whenever they feel like it without breaking many of them. I can and do control software installations on my machines.
>I can't stop my phone's apps from updating whenever they feel like it
If you're on Android
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!
You can blame Linux distros as a whole, for being obsessed with dynamic linking shared libraries.
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].
Packaging software for Windows is clearly a pain, because every time I install a game I get a download, followed by a launcher, followed by one or several MSVC++ runtimes, then another download, then some kind of extraction phase, a restart and then a menu. Unless I'm one of the first people to download the game, of course, because then I get a popup stating that the file I downloaded can't be trusted and that I should delete it.
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.
I mean you can put up a `.deb` with a statically linked binary on your download page right? You can also use stuff like App Image right? It's not like nobody has ever put a go binary into a .deb before.
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.
Yep, several projects I know are leaning into AppImage to get around dealing with installers. The biggest problem with AppImage is that it _is_ just a binary, so things like desktop shortcuts don't come with it. AppImageLauncher does solve this issue (and create a "canonical place" to place your programs, like /Applications/ on mac).
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.
You can statically link your apps just fine as long as you follow the license for the libraries you're linking (in the case of libc, the LGPL.) Before you get upset about this Windows does the same thing with their C runtime (although the license terms are different.) Ever seen the installer for it when you install another app? That's exactly what's going on.
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’ll blame Linux as a whole for every app needing several deb files (one per distro Ubuntu/Debian/etc and one per LTS), several rpm files (one per distro RH/Fedora/etc and one per LTS), and several <100+ chars omitted for brevity).
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.
I believe most projects that serve debs from their own download page do not try to package for each distro separately, and instead opt to package up requirements as needed.
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!
That's exactly what the problem is. The diffusion of responsibility makes it a decades-long problem and nobody has the responsibility or the power to fix it.
It’s indeed not unreasonable to want that, but there does not exist any incentive structure that would cause it to exist. It’s not the fault of some person or group of people doing something wrong; it’s simply a logical consequence of what Linux is.
Sure, I’d be fine with any standard. It’s just insane how just about every distro has its own sporadically updated repo instead of sharing common packages. Projects that need to be patched and rebuilt should be the exception, not the rule.
Scroll down and you’ll see people arguing about supported features because they’re running an ancient version of Thunderbird supplied by their distro.
> 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.
You can do this on Linux, too, be it by compiling a static binary or bundling everything as an AppImage or what have you.
Sorry yes I overreacted to the first sentence without understanding the tone.
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.
...And that's why Linux still languishes on the desktop, QED.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You are complaining about something that would cost huge amounts of money to develop not existing for free, but not proposing any way to raise that money or provide an alternative incentive structure causing it to exist.
> 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.
"You are complaining about something that would cost huge amounts of money to develop not existing for free..."
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.
"Download this blob and run it to install software systemwide" isn't something that works well on any platform anymore, FWIW, and you shouldn't do it even (especially) if it's cleanly package in a self-executing installer.
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!
On the user error bit, all I can say is that it is a trade-off. If you wait until your distribution does the hard work for you, by releasing the updated package, your experience will be far less painful than it is under competing operating systems. Of course, that does mean waiting.
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.
Thank you for explaining why the Linux Desktop is a giant usability failure and how 'defining' Linux support is an impossibility.
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.
You're welcome to look at the Linux situation that way if you choose to, but claiming that Windows and macOS packaging works consistently and natively is a huge stretch of the imagination.
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.
TBH that's a feature not a bug. If you don't know what to do here you probably don't know enough to evaluate the safety of the software you just downloaded. Your distro maintainers will pick it up soon and it will show up on your machine the next time you run apt upgrade.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> You should not have to know what any of those words mean to use an operating system
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?
Ok, so I'll go to software center and click a button to install Thunderbird. It won't be the absolute latest version but I don't really care since computers aren't that interesting to me.
Who is complaining? I don't often see Linux users complaining that its market share is low, outside of free software ideologues. This seems to be 99% a strawman.
I don't care if Linux has 0.00000001% market share as long as it still does what I want.
> I'm on an Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop computer. I click on the big green Free Download button.
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....
Come the fuck on, really? Are you really asking someone why they would click the button that says download and is prominently displayed and then acting like they are stupid for expecting it to download?
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.
You are on Ubuntu so shouldn't you have to install software from the Software app (or whatever it is called now), which is a GUI over apt and snap? I get my Thunderbird updates through the system update tool. Same for Firefox, BTW.
Generally you install software from the app store, which is called "Discover" in Ubuntu. However, the newest version of Thunderbird hasn't been shipped out there yet, so you might have to wait a day or two. It is available as a candidate release though, so if you want to try out Thunderbird 102 right now, you can open a terminal and type:
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.
Linux really just needs to adopt AppImage as the default manual install package. A single download that runs the actual application when you click it, no installation necessary. It may have a larger file size due to bundling dependencies that are already on the machine, but people who are bandwidth or diskpace limited can use their repo or tarballs instead. Just make the default option the simplest for non-techies to deal with.
Okay. Why should the Linux community care about this? It is not a business trying to sell something to as many people as possible. It’s a diverse set of people and companies each working on whatever is important to them.
If consumers want consumer-level support, they can buy a Mac. What’s the problem?
Because the Linux community also cares about expanding freedom- and privacy-respecting general purpose computing to as broad a user base as possible. Simplifying the user experience is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, requirement for that.
> Because the Linux community also cares about expanding freedom- and privacy-respecting general purpose computing to as broad a user base as possible.
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.
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).
> Or will this always just be user error! you're doing it wrong!
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'.
It has. AppImages work exactly as a user would expect them to. Even if the AppImage is not marked as executable, one of the problems I can imagine a new user encountering, Dolphin (KDE file manager) asks if I want to trust and run the file anyways.
It is on Thunderbird for just distributing a weird tar file. Preferably, their download button would take you to an installation instructions page.
And idea how to get Dolphin to "register" the AppImage as an application? (so it shows up in menus). Manually making AppImage .desktop files is always a bit clunk and you don't get the proper icons. I know there is some thrid party tool that does it more properly, but I wonder if there is an integrated way
I swear this used to work automatically and at some point it was removed.. or maybe I'm misremembering
If you extracted the entire thunderbird folder from the archive instead of attempting to execute a single binary in a compressed archive, you could have avoided this entire flame war. And you would have had a functional email client
> Will desktop Linux ever solve these basic usability problems?
Never.
Desktop Linux will never solve these simple usability issues since the developers are too busy fighting for who is the smartest one of them all.
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.
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!