I have a strange issue. Two days ago, I installed Thunderbird v128 as a flatpak using Discover. It ran and worked fine. However, after updating my system today (incl. flatpaks), Thunderbird got downgraded to v115. I can’t open it anymore, because it asks me to create a new user profile, which means I’d need to add all my email accounts again.
I’ve tried downloading it from the thunderbird.net website, but that downloads a tar.bz2 archive, and I’m not sure what to do with it (zypper won’t install it).
So, my question is: how can I install Thunderbird 128 on Tumbleweed, given that the Flathub store no longer has that version?
It seems the Thunderbird Homepage is in an inconsistent state. Release 115 is still listed as actual version. Also the release notes say 115 is the latest actual version. But some download links are already providing 128…
So it seems the homepage is actually overworked to provide informations for the new 128 version. Flathub may also need some time to pick up the new 128 version.
But nevertheless, the link above for the profile management still applies to get back to a working state.
I should have clarified: I’d like to install Thunderbird in a way that’s easy to update.
I’m unsure how I’d update the 128 version provided by the Thunderbird website, since the installation guide you linked mentions manually copying files to /opt. Does it come with an auto-updater? Or would I have to manually override Thunderbird each time?
Profile migration seems straightforward enough. After manual installation, I used this Reddit post as reference and ran cp -r $HOME/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/ ~/.thunderbird/ and then running thunderbird -P.
Still, this feels like a workaround, as the Mozilla team seems confused about which Thunderbird version (115 vs 128) should be displayed as latest.
I guess I’ll live with this for now and wait for Flathub to update to 128.
The update process is easy, it is an auto-updater (similar to the Windows version). There is no need to overwrite TB each time.
115.13.0 is the latest 115 version.
128.0 is the first release of the 128 version, but 115 should not auto-update to 128.0, that is scheduled for a later version, like 128.03. Actually this happens with every major release (once a year), the auto-update is not offered for the xxx.0 version
Then I guess the downloaded version works fine also. Though after checking out Flathub, it looks like the Thunderbird flatpak is back on 128. So maybe the 115 downgrade was an error. I’ll stick with the flatpak, as it works well enough. So, the solution apparently was patience.
That wouldn’t really solve my issue, though. That repo only seems to have 115.13.0. I had 128 installed from Flathub, which got downgraded to 115. Because of the downgrade, I was unable to launch Thunderbird without losing all my email accounts (I have 6 set up + some specific configs).