A fantastic explanation cheers. I have also YouTubed packagers so am a little familiar with the concepts, and tbh having lived the nightmare world of Windows dll hell where many apps tried to share libraries, I'm happy with the disadvantages of Flatpack if it means each are self contained and there's minimal cross contamination of libraries or permissions. It's just understanding some of the nuances - no different to being a Windoze admin which I've been for 35+ years. Also an MFC/ATL C++/C# and C firmware dev for many years, albeit quite some time ago nowadays.
Not quite, TB (deb/apk) was installed with the default install of Zorin 17.3, however I noticed its version was way out of date and wanted the new look and feel of the polished latter versions (running on my Win10), so installed Flatpack version. I never used Flatseal but the symbolic link resolved the profile issue. The export / import failure I suspect was simply the size of my mail box, however I'll revisit this soon and perform a complete reinstall from scratch (hopefully from scratch if I can locate any remaining file/folders after uninstall and remove, I suspect Linux doesn't have a registry to tidy also?). I remember the Windows days where you needed additional tools to remove apps fully, it's no better, just different!
I might also try Flatseal and get to grips with this too, another tool in my belt
Ah, so it was the other way around... well, same difference I guess
That makes sense. Thunderbird has seen a lot of improvements over the past year or so, and I would expect there's a lot more going forward since Mozilla is relying on it heavily to keep its brand image clean after the TOS scandal.
But Flatpak doesn't modify how it works or what features it provides, it's just a means to an end.
Today I stripped my Zorin 17.3 of all versions of Thunderbird (TB) and removed the symbolic link using: terminal > unlink ~/.thunderbird
For installing Flatpak Thunderbird (current Flatpak version v128, strange as latest version on their site is v138, but anyway...)
Note process carried out using IMAP accounts only.
Install Thunderbird Flatpak package - do not run yet
Export Thunderbird profile from an.other machine if needed. TB > Options (hamburger menu) > Tools > Export.
Note: possible import failure with large mail stores.
Create symbolic link to help TB locate the Flatpak TB profile store (TB doesn't know where this is without): terminal > ln -s ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird ~/.thunderbird
Run TB.
Import settings: TB > Options > Tools > Import - note unselect mail if large MB.
For my case I set a few TB options in order to restrict email sync to 1 year and only download mail under 1MB - in order to save HDD space only.
I was not aware TB is present in 17.3, I thought Evolution was the de facto. I personally will never go back to TB because Google has it's claws even deeper into Mozilla. I'd love to get rid of GMail but I need it to be logged in as a moderator on JitsiMeet.
It looks like the version they've packaged up as Flatpak is the ESR (Extended Support Release). There's no guarantee that Flatpak are always at the latest version anyway, maybe they have some reason to ship this one instead?
As far as I heard, they switch the Release Model to the one that You get with Firefox, too. So, You have the ''normal'' up-to-date Version and an ESR Version. But this is really new. Maybe the Flatpak Version isn't ready or they only offer the ESR Version for Flatpak, maybe they will offer both in the Future. I guess Time will tell.
Windows versions ahead of the game again! Whilst anyone experienced will have been burned by using the latest versions and likely holds off, having the option is often useful too.
