Think email client and the obvious example is Mozilla’s Thunderbird. But whether you’re a T long-time Thunderbird user or looking for a new email client, you may find that Betterbird is – if you’ll excuse the pun – a better fit. That’s particularly true if you’re missing features that have quietly been dropped from Thunderbird in recent years.
Betterbird is a fork of Thunderbird, but it’s careful to stick closely to its parent in what Betterbird describes is a “soft fork”. It closely follows the Thunderbird ESR release schedules to ensure it remains as secure as Thunderbird itself and is built from the latest version of Thunderbird ESR before applying its own fixes, features and customisations.
All of Betterbird’s bug fixes are submitted upstream to allow Thunderbird to benefit from them if it wishes – and many do eventually make their way into the main program. To find out more about the Betterbird project in general, check out the box (below).
Hatch your better chick
The simplest way to get Betterbird on your system is via Flatpak (https://flathub.org/apps/eu.betterbird.
Betterbird), although there are glitches to consider, as outlined at its GitHub page (https://github.com/flathub/eu.betterbird.Betterbird). ArchLinux users will also find the app is available through its package repo.
Betterbird’s native executable is 64-bit only and built on Mint 20.2, which means it’s supported on 64-bit versions of Debian (11 or later), Ubuntu (20.04 or later) and Mint (20 or later). You can download and extract this directly from www.betterbird.eu/ downloads but a better option is to use the Betterbird Dirty Update script.
