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Thunderbird goes to GUADEC 2024

GUADEC is the annual GNOME conference and this year it was in beautiful Denver, Colorado. Why are we writing about this on the Thunderbird blog? I’m so glad you asked. Thunderbird was there and our very own Ryan Sipes gave a compelling keynote talk!

Ryan’s GUADEC 2024 Keynote

Ryan gave a brief history lesson of Thunderbird, detailed how we survived tough times, and what exciting new things we are working on, including our recent Supernova release.

While Thunderbird is cross platform, Ryan highlighted our current focus on native integration with Linux systems, starting with an initial implementation of a Linux system tray icon. We are committed to our Linux users more than ever, no matter their choice of desktop environment, packaging type, or flavor of Linux.

Thunderbird in the Hallway Track

Besides Ryan’s talk, there were several meaningful conversations, relevant to various aspects of Thunderbird.

• There are shared struggles between our calendar and GNOME calendar, revealing opportunities to work together towards a common solution.
• Since the Thunderbird flatpak is one of our supported packages for Linux systems, it was great to hear an update from the flatpak and xdg-desktop-portals developers. We can start to think of how we can leverage recent and upcoming changes to portals to improve the Thunderbird flatpak.
• Ryan’s talk pointed out our need for privacy respecting telemetry, and it turns out that is shared by the GNOME app developers as well. Expect to hear more about this in future blog posts, as events develop.

Overall, this year’s GUADEC was an excellent week of collaboration, where we shared many wonderful ideas and strengthened our comradery. Thunderbird’s presence at this conference showed us where we can work with the broader GNOME community and support one another in a way that benefits all of our users. We thank the GNOME foundation for the excellent organization.

Let the collaboration continue!