Thunderbird Littering My Home

You can skip inotify tools altogether and do use systemd like this to trigger `rm -rf`:

    `~/.config/systemd/user/remove-thunderbird-dir.path`

   [Unit]
   Description=Watch for unwanted ~/thunderbird directory
   

   [Path]
   PathExists=%h/thunderbird
   Unit=remove-thunderbird-dir.service
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=default.target

I've long given up on keeping a clean home folder because so many software do this and keeping it clean is a constant chore. Now I just make a real_home folder in my 'home' and put all my actual stuff there. They can use the ~ landfill

There's more! On my machine it creates an empty ~/.mozilla/extensions directory every time it starts, and I have no idea why it does that or how to make it stop.

Try Betterbird. On the whole I find that fork a better experience than Thunderbird.

There are so many annoyances in TB. I stopped using it after a few days. My primary concerns:

  - Opening an email thread opens multiple (potentially many) tabs, and is difficult to nagivate or understand the flow of messages
  - I don't know how to write an email without it making the spacing between paragraphs/lines larger than I would like. (I.e. double-spacing)
  - Search is unreliable / broken.

Is there any hope that Thunderbird might benefit from XDG config directories fix that Firefox recently implemented?

Most of the time, you can control where XDG puts its litter, cf. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories

Just note that XDG_DESKTOP_DIR and XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR can not point to the same directory or chromium will disregard your config.

P.S. Reader, if you can commit to chromium without much hassle, check this and fix: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Talk:XDG_user_directories

You're lucky you only get one. I get two, `~/thunderbird/` and `~/Thunderbird/`

Another unit that requires mental load.

Seems like with Claude you could have submitted a PR (to actually fix the issue) in the time it took to come up with the hack.