Just stumbled upon betterbird - an overlay app of sorts that brings thunderbird to a somewhat better place (hence the namesake?).
I say “stumbled” because thunderbird generally works fine. It’s just so long in the tooth that it prompts me to occasionally look for something better. There’s surprisingly little good useful coverage I’ve seen of Linux email clients in recent years. Most are 2+ years older and the breakthroughs seem to have gone stale. Perhaps I’m just not looking in the right places?
So I kept following various paths down rabbit holes until I found betterbird mentioned, almost in passing.
Anyhow, by laying betterbird on top of my existing thunderbird data/email sets, it becomes a relatively simple, lightweight test of functionality.
So far, it seems like something “better.” No, it’s not a massive breakthrough. But the improvements are noteworthy. And at least I feel like I’ve accomplished something
I will agree BB is superior to TB, as you say, development essentially seems to have stopped on TB about 2015 (off the cuff).
And I agree, there’s not much new in the email client world (or I don’t know of it), I gave up and just use web based mail now.
Same here, although decided to use TB for my main email account, since it was installed. I originally intended to use it also for school and work email, but both required permissions from IT-department and their answer time was… Well… Let’s just say that sloth would have run marathon on that time they took to answer something.
It may be better but in reality what is it going to do for the average user that just wants to get their email, read it, reply and or send messages? I use Thunderbird and i don’t need anything more than what it gives me.
It’s just another bird. If you like birds you tend to feed them all.
Very tempting … unfortunately for me, I have three different email sources, so a unified email client sure makes life easier than checking 3 separate web sites.
I just gave it a shot: because it is based on the yearly release of Thunderbird (esr version, currently 128), it is not so straightforward to jump from one to the other (unless we also use the esr version of Thunderbird from AUR). The next esr version will be 140 (this summer).
Launching it the first time with the command betterbird -p -purgecaches -allow-downgrade, the version mismatch can be bypassed to import the existing profile.
After accessing the profile from Betterbird, I observe a few UX bugs when I open Thunderbird.
As I am not aware of a Betterbird-only feature that could be useful to me, and since I use the dark reader update from version 136 (and deleted the add-on), I revert to Thunderbird for now.
When choosing between the main branch and this soft fork, there seems to be a real trade-off between new features and specific features or bugs solved.
Can someone showcase a clear usage improvement in Betterbird?
Interesting. I simply get betterbird updates in the process of periodic yay updates - nothing special involved at my end. Currently running 128 on various installations.
Haven’t had any hiccups that I can detect, or need for special commands.
As for whether betterbird is superior to thunderbird I can only offer that it’s been working nicely for me although I cannot tell you there are amazing benefits … they’re small incremental things as cited here:
Again, not a game-changer. But seems to be maintained and improved more thoroughly vs the thunderbird original.
