I’m unhappy with the state of Thunderbird on Ubuntu and have been having some frustrations. This will be a post/topic stating some opinions, and asking for tips/advice and asking some open-ended questions.
Before I get started, let me share some facts:
- I am running Ubuntu Asahi 25.04
- my laptop CPU is Apple M1
- I want a modern (v140.x) version of Thunderbird
and let me share some context:
- I also have amd64 machines running Ubuntu 24.04 or 25.04
- I prefer these distribution channels from best to worse:
- a proper Apt repository
- an Ubuntu PPA
- Snap
- Flatpak
- binary download
- compile myself
- I’m not trying to pass blame to any one party. Between the Thunderbird team, the Flatpak maintainers, Mozilla, and Canonical, there are several moving pieces here.
Failed Tries
Okay so I’m ultimately trying to get Thunderbird running on my Ubuntu Asahi laptop. Just getting any old version running via whatever method isn’t the issue. I can do that. I want v140.x. Here’s what I’ve tried and why it hasn’t worked.
The Mozilla Official Apt Repository
I’m not a fan of Ubuntu swapping out more and more software to snaps by default. Especially at the expense of the pre-existing apt packages. Firefox & Thunderbird are such software that suffered this fate. To solve this problem with Firefox, I setup the official Apt repository from Mozilla following this OMG! Ubuntu article. For Firefox, it worked and I’m happy. For Thunderbird it didn’t.
Upon further research, it looks like there isn’t a Thunderbird package in there. It’s my understanding that this is a result of Thunderbird no longer being apart of Mozilla (the business) even though it’s still part of Mozilla (the foundation). Anyone know if this is true?
The Mozilla PPA
My next attempt was the use the old Mozilla PPA that I used back in the day. This PPA supports Firefox both the current version as well as the ESR. They handle this by using two different package names, firefox and firefox-esr. Awesome. Thunderbird? Not so much. They only have the old ESR version and an even older versions, all under the same package name. No way for me to get the current release.
The Forced Snap Package
Fine, I’ll use the snap even if I didn’t prefer it. I ran into more issues though.
- Even though there is an
ESRchannel for the Snap, by default, thelatestchannel installs the old v128 ESR version. That doesn’t make sense. - v140, the ESR track as well as the normal release versions, are out and stable. The snap doesn’t have them as stable.
- A channel actually went backwards in a version, which screwed up my setup. (ref)
- The releases for the amd64 snap don’t match the releases for the arm64 snap. Here are what they look like today:
arm64
| channel | version |
|---|---|
| latest/stable | 128.11.1esr-1 |
| latest/candidate | 128.13.0esr-3 |
| latest/beta | 142.0b1-3 |
| latest/edge | 142.0b1-3 |
| esr/stable | none |
| esr/candidate | 140.0.1esr-1 |
| esr/beta | 140.0.1esr-1 |
| esr/edge | 140.0.1esr-1 |
amd64
| channel | version |
|---|---|
| latest/stable | 128.12.0esr-1 |
| latest/candidate | 128.13.0esr-3 |
| latest/beta | 142.0b1-3 |
| esr/stable | none |
| esr/candidate | 140.1.0esr-1 |
| esr/beta | 140.1.0esr-1 |
I would like to install the current, non-ESR release. I would also like versions to be consistent across my laptops. The snap doesn’t seem able to do that for me right now.
The Flatpak on Flathub
Seems like there’s only one channel and it’s the old v128 ESR? No.
Binary Download from Thunderbird.net
I gave up on having updates from a package manager and said I’ll just download it. I ran into two problems here:
- After clicking download, I didn’t get any instructions on what to do with the download. I did of course get a pop up to donate though.
- It simply didn’t work. Running Thunderbird did nothing.
For the first issue, I eventually found the instructions but it could have been easier. I also had to download the .desktop file separately from GitHub instead of it being provided in the tarball I downloaded.
For the second issue, I looked through my logs and saw that there was an error starting up Thunderbird. After some brainstorming, I ran file /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird to realize that the download was for amd64 Linux, not ARM. I went back to the website and looked through the options on the download page. Not one allows me to change the architecture to get an arm download. Why?
Compiling
The Thunderbird website mentioned 25-30GB will be needed to compile Thunderbird. I didn’t feel up for that at the moment. I’ll revist this in the future.
Now What?
Has anyone run into these problems? Is there a straightforward method to install modern Thunderbird that I missed? The Mozilla repo and PPA I don’t believe I would get access to. The Snap is maintained by Canonical and not Snapcrafters which means I don’t think I can help contribute and fix that up. The Thunderbird people are on Matrix (according to the website) but I’m not ready to install software to access yet another chat system right now.
Thoughts?