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I am trying to delete Thunderbird mail since I primarily use Gmail in the browser. However, on trying to remove it I'm getting the following error:

$ sudo apt-get remove Thunderbird Mail
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package Thunderbird
E: Unable to locate package Mail
BeastOfCaerbannog
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1 Answers1

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It seems that @mook765's comment is the solution for your issue:

If it's installed as a deb-package, use sudo apt remove thunderbird.

However, based on your comment, your understanding about why this command worked is not correct (formatting and some text fixes my own):

Thanks mook765, it worked. I was using sudo apt-get remove thunderbird instead.

You see, sudo apt remove thunderbird and sudo apt-get remove thunderbird should have both worked. After all, apt is more or less a front-end for apt-get, as you can read in What is the difference between apt and apt-get? What this means is that when you run sudo apt remove <package>, sudo apt-get remove <package> is run behind the scenes.

Then, you may ask, why were you getting Unable to locate package errors? The answer is in your question: You were not running sudo apt-get remove thunderbird, but sudo apt-get remove Thunderbird Mail instead. To make it more clear, you were trying to remove Thunderbird by providing the program's name (Thunderbird Mail) instead of the package's name, which is thunderbird.

Additionally, the reason why you were getting two Unable to locate package errors is because apt and apt-get expect each package to be a single string, without spaces. Spaces are used to separate packages, since apt and apt-get accept multiple packages as arguments. So when you were running sudo apt-get remove Thunderbird Mail, apt-get was trying to find and uninstall a package named Thunderbird, but couldn't find it (it's case sensitive), so you got the first Unable to locate package error, and then was trying to find the package Mail, which also couldn't find, so you got the second Unable to locate package error.

If you want to know how to find the package name of a program, you may have a look at How do I search for available packages from the command-line?, from which I recommend @jbrock's suggestion for using:

apt search keyword

where keyword is usually a part of the program's name.

BeastOfCaerbannog
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