Thunderbird Vs Gnome stack: more types of installation presets possible?

Currently Ubuntu ships with

  • Thunderbird (which includes mail, calendar, to do, chat)
  • Gnome online accounts
  • Gnome to do
  • Gnome calendar

Thunderbird can’t connect to GOA. Gnome to do and gnome calendar miss Geary or evolution to be feature complete. I think this is a little bit confusing and unsatisfying for users.
Also it looks like some people are not satisfied with Thunderbird. (see the other thread). Personally I’m a big fan of Thunderbird and pay them monthly. But I can understand that other users don’t like it.

Ubuntu has a minimal installation which you can choose over the normal installation. Would it be technically possible to have three different installation types instead of two @didrocks @wimpress . Would be:

  • Minimal mode, like the current
  • Plus Thunderbird mode
    Or
  • plus gnome online accounts, Gnome to do, gnome calendar, geary

I hope this is the correct category :smiley:

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I just tried Geary out after reading this thread. I have not used it in many years. I have to say while it looks nice I can’t got past a certain time in my inbox which is pretty much useless to me. With Thunderbird I do not have this issue and I can go back and forth to old, very old to fairly new emails without any lag. While Thunderbird might be old in the looks department, it has Geary beat in functionality. Evolution, not sure about that, as I haven’t used in at all in last 10 years. Maybe it is time to give that a try.

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Default software selection is a bit tricky, I don’t think adding another option like that would be something very clear to users.

We talked in the past about some onboarding experience helping users to install the software they need to be productive (ask what they use the computer for and do recommendations based on the answers) which might be another approach.

One other option we started discussing is to not provide an email client by default anymore and just let users install one from the store

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I know users that liked Firefox and Thunderbird preinstalled when they switched away from Windows because that were the first Open source projects they had interaction with.

The idea of an onboarding experience seems good.

I think currently it’s also confusing to have gnome calendar plus Todo plus Thunderbird.

Also first the tour pops up, askes you to connect your accounts.
Then you open Thunderbird and then you need to add your account again.

Right, those are valid points, we had discussions in the past about how to solve those issues but there is no easy solution. (see e.g https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/evolution-again-as-default-email-app-client for an email integration vs brand vs feature discussion)

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