Thunderbird Littering My Home

Home folder litter is one of my top pet peeves in computing. In fact it's the only reason why I refuse to use snaps on Ubuntu. I don't even care about whatever technical stuff everyone argues about - but snaps create a permanent `~/snap/` directory and Ubuntu devs don't care. There's been a bug report on Launchpad for over a decade[1] and it's the second highest voted bug in Ubuntu history, but no, Ubuntu devs think littering the home folder with highly visible system-level machinery is totally unavoidable.

It's like putting your car's engine in the passenger seat - rude, intolerable, and plain stupid. What if Grandma was browsing her home folder and deleted `~/snap/` because she has no idea what it is?

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053

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

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

There's more! On my machine it creates an empty ~/.mozilla/extensions directory every time it starts, and I have no idea why it does that or how to make it stop.

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.

> Systemd user services need absolute paths

no, you use the specifiwr %h instead of ~ here is the expensive list of specifiers https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

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

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

Reminds me of this other post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447935), which suggests the following solution:

If you create your own `~/thunderbird` directory, then Thunderbird will stop littering your home directory.

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 cant stand apps littering my home folder, regardless of if they are invisible folders or whatever. I am looking forward to deleting my operating system, or just the user account, and only installing apps in a virtual machine

You're lucky you only get one. I get two, `~/thunderbird/` and `~/Thunderbird/`

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

Is there any hope that Thunderbird might benefit from XDG config directories fix that Firefox recently implemented?

Another unit that requires mental load.

Seems like with Claude you could have submitted a PR (to actually fix the issue) in the time it took to come up with the hack.