Thunderbird snap / package ?

[Wawa.Voun]

Hello There,

Usually I have my Thunderbird profile stored on a ntfs disk mounted as /mnt/....

I do that to share this profile with Thunderbird / Windows.

Since Thunderbird come as snap packages I have serious problems with this system. I never have problem doing that with Kubuntu before.

He forget language settings between each use and the toolbar cant be configured (menu entry is grey) and so on (there is a lot of ubiquitous errors if I launch it from console)...

Even with no explicit error message about that I strongly suspect that this come from restricted access rights on the profile folder / files because if I move the same profile onto my home directory everything go smoothly.

Is there something to do to get / improve Thunderbird access to mounted ntfs directory ?

Thanks for the help and regards.
Philippe

[Schwarzer Kater]

Welcome.

You could install the "traditional" Thunderbird additionally to or instead of the Thunderbird Snap.

See e.g. Script to install traditional Thunderbird or the "Bonus" section in Essential and strongly recommended things to do directly after a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS installation.

[Wawa.Voun]

Thanks for the link. "Essential and strongly...." is very informative.

I know I can use traditional packages but I want to try to stay in the Kubuntu way.
These kinds of solutions are efficient but increase the work at each upgrade so I use only in case of lost of hope... Which is not the stage I am right now !

Is there a solution to improve the situation using Thunderbird snap package ?

[Schwarzer Kater]

You could try importing your stuff on the NTFS partition from the Thunderbird Snap…

[Wawa.Voun]

I read here and there that some modifications should be done into apt configuration files in order to avoid automatic re installation of thunderbird / firefox snap.

Are these scripts taking care of that ?

Thanks and regards.
Philippe

[oshunluvr]

Yes. that is handled. The Black Kitten has covered just everything I can think of in those scripts.

[Schwarzer Kater]

The install traditional Thunderbird and install traditional Firefox scripts do not block anything as they want to give users the possibility to additionally use the Snap versions and other Snap programs.

If you want to remove Snap entirely and block the future reinstallation of all Snap programs (like e.g. Linux Mint and TUXEDO OS do), you would have to additionally run the get rid of Snap script - beware that this will remove every Snap program and its settings from your system! This script also takes care of the appropriate APT configuration files.
If you wanted to revert this and use Snap again later on, you could use the reinstall Snap for release-upgrade script for this (and of course directly before a release-upgrade to the next Kubuntu version, e.g. from 23.10 to 24.04 LTS). This will not bring back any individual settings the other script removed earlier, of course, but will also remove the APT configuration files that blocked Snaps (which have been installed by the get rid of Snap script).

If you just wanted to block the reinstallation of a single Snap program but wanted to keep Snap and other Snap programs you would have to individually use APT pinning for this case only in /etc/apt/preferences.d .

[Schwarzer Kater]

PS:
If you miss some programs or wanted to use "containerized" programs for certain use cases after running the get rid of Snap script you could enable Flatpak (which is used by default by many other distributions than *Ubuntu) instead of Snap.

[jglen490]

Yep,the Schwarzer Kater scripts work GREAT! I copied the scripts and the Read Me files for each script. Being a prototypical "dim bulb" tester, I kept each Read Me file open as I executed the script, just to follow and be sure.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Thank you jglen490 - I am glad you find them useful!

[jglen490]

Other than a couple of file names with the string "snap" included (mostly some .svg files), not a trace of snapd, pr snap executables. Yes, very useful