Thunderbird can't find existing user profile

snap
1

Using Thunderbird (edge) as an upgrade to the default version fails, because the snap uses a non-standard location for the user-profile. Any existing profile will be stored in ~/.thunderbird but snap uses ~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird/

The official way to tell Thunderbird to use an older, existing profile would be entering thunderbird -ProfileManager in a console, but the profile manager has no ability to look for a profile in a different directory.

2

You can try just copying (or moving) the entire existing thunderbird profile from ~/.thunderbird to ~/snap/thunderbird/common and you should be good. Pretty sure I did this when I migrated from the traditionally installed thunderbird to the snap.

1 Like
3

Note that the chromium snap has some logic to import an existing profile the first time it is run.
This requires the personal-files plug to be connected.

4

There’s something not user-friendly here.
Alan’s tip does not work. TB --profile-manager does not take account of the new data.

Running TB 78.2.1 (edge channel at the moment) I had to:

  • launch TB snap
  • close TB snap
  • delete the snap profile’s folder content
  • copy all the old profile folder content in the snap profile folder
  • launch TB snap
  • remove all the unused langpacks in TB extensions menu (to have full native language in TB)
  • restart TB
5

It did, but Mozilla changed the on disk format in the newest release (since my post) and there’s no migration as I understand it.

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6

Ok !

Well, I migrated FF and TB to snaps. Seems to work very well. Still the first run quite slow (using i7+NVMe…), but you know that.

Do you know why LibreOffice or Snap Store snaps still do not render my fonts correctly (Roboto from Ubuntu repo) ? Because fonts are fully ok in FF and TB snaps (spacing is as in deb versions). I do use Wayland GNOME session.

image

Last question : since some deb versions, FF does not respect default UI font in search bar. But I notice it’s ok using the snap. Why ? (Please note this snap better behaviour than deb for future use. :yum: )

Last last question : will TB be a Canonical (as author) snap ? I know Kevin is yours, but Canonical is not a one-man-team and FF snap is from Canonical.

7

Currently experiencing the same for Thunderbird 91 (candidate).

I believe this happened after the update because I remember checking them earlier this week (last update at the time of writing is August 27).

I checked ~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird/, and it created a new profile. My old profile is still there, and still accessible when I ran snap run thunderbird -ProfileManager

8

This is a known issue that is being resolved.