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Thunderbird Littering My Home

thefoggiest.dev

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Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#41
post #2

I've long given up on keeping a clean home folder because so many software do this and keeping it clean is a constant chore. Now I just make a real_home folder in my 'home' and put all my actual stuff there. They can use the ~ landfill

I stopped using that software no matter how painful it was some games included. I wanted to play BG2 and the remake from GOG just litter the Documents folder even when running though Wine. Well, no game for then. Pity. I want my computer to serve me and to have my own files where yo want them.

Wouldn't it be possible to run the game in a container, so it has no access to your home dir?

(I've only used lxc for stuff like WordPress, haven't ever used it for GUI stuff.)

Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#42
post #9

You can skip inotify tools altogether and do use systemd like this to trigger `rm -rf`: `~/.config/systemd/user/remove-thunderbird-dir.path` [Unit] Description=Watch for unwanted ~/thunderbird directory [Path] PathExists=%h/thunderbird Unit=remove-thunderbird-dir.service [Install] WantedBy=default.target

So often the answer to "Can systemd just do that?" is "yes." But before AI, it was hard to surface the way to do it. Now I can get a lot done just by asking Claude for a few ways of doing something, and often the systemd answer is there.

Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#43
Personally I have never been bothered by programs using my home folder. I don’t regularly ls the contents of it, and just browse by path from my shell anyway, so the clutter is barely visible to me

Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#45
post #22

Try Betterbird. On the whole I find that fork a better experience than Thunderbird.

What's better for you?

After four months of use I've had not a single hiccup or misbehavior with it, none of the sudden stalls or "beachballing" I had every so often with TB when fetching/sending despite running my own mail server inside my home network, nor any crashes (which to be fair weren't common with TB). I get the impression that the developers tread more carefully with feature updates. I perceive it as starting up and getting to fetch/process faster. I also appreciate that it's about half the size, as they provide a dedicated Arm64 bundle instead of a "universal" Arm+x86 flavor.

Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#46

If you don’t have any need for Windows/Mac support, I highly recommend moving to something that isn’t Thunderbird. My pick is Evolution but there are many other options.

I've used Evolution for years but lately it's started choking on gmail OAuth support. The solution appears to be installing Gnome keychain support, which then messes with KDE Wallet. For now I'm just using the web and the mobile app

Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#47
post #9

You can skip inotify tools altogether and do use systemd like this to trigger `rm -rf`: `~/.config/systemd/user/remove-thunderbird-dir.path` [Unit] Description=Watch for unwanted ~/thunderbird directory [Path] PathExists=%h/thunderbird Unit=remove-thunderbird-dir.service [Install] WantedBy=default.target

So often the answer to "Can systemd just do that?" is "yes." But before AI, it was hard to surface the way to do it. Now I can get a lot done just by asking Claude for a few ways of doing something, and often the systemd answer is there.

I think it is because AI and systemd are colleages, growing to do anything and everything.

Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or worked

There's a patch in the bug report and it appears to be tagged for Thunderbird 153 release. While I'm here I got to say, it's worrying seeing people not calling out what a bad solution the OP has suggested. Implementing a blind removal of a folder is not good practice. You will forget about this script/unit file. One day you may copy all your Thunderbird data to ~/thunderbird, think you're safe, then boom, it's gone.…

`rmdir` is not `rm -rf`. It only removes empty directories.

Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#49

There are so many annoyances in TB. I stopped using it after a few days. My primary concerns: - Opening an email thread opens multiple (potentially many) tabs, and is difficult to nagivate or understand the flow of messages - I don't know how to write an email without it making the spacing between paragraphs/lines larger than I would like. (I.e. double-spacing) - Search is unreliable / broken.

Ctrl + Shift + O opens a threaded conversation in a new tab.

Settings > Composition > Use paragraph format… set to unchecked

Search has always worked pretty well for me, with the exception of not searching message bodies in a folder that's set to only download messages on demand. If the folder is set for offline use, the bodies are there and searchable. I use the Quick Filter bar 99% of the time, anyway, it's great.

Still my preferred client.

Re: Thunderbird Littering My Home

#50

Most of the time, you can control where XDG puts its litter, cf. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories Just note that XDG_DESKTOP_DIR and XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR can not point to the same directory or chromium will disregard your config. P.S. Reader, if you can commit to chromium without much hassle, check this and fix: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Talk:XDG_user_directories

https://github.com/mxmilkiib/dotfiles/blob/main/xdg/.config/...
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