Which Thunderbird to install

General Help
1

I have Zorin Core 16.3 installed on Thinkpad X1 Carbon G6,
I downloaded the Firefox ESR and installed it, deleted the 'regular' Firefox FastRelease/regular channel (horrid changes every few weeks Ack!).
Now I am trying to figure which Thunderbird to install.
There are two in the Zorin Software center:
Thunderbird Mail -
Ver: 1:115.4.1+build1-0ubuntu0.20.04.1~mt1
Src: lp_ppa_mozillateam-focal-main
Download: 62.2 MB
OR:
Thunderbird -
Dev: MZLA Technologies, part of the Mozilla Foundation
Src: dl.flathub.org
Ver: 115.3.2
Installed: 269.1 MB
Download : 660.9 MB
and the THIRD option comes from https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/alternatives-to-windows-apps/ which lists :
Thunderbird Open Source (pre-installed in Zorin OS Lite)
https://www.thunderbird.net/
And that link goes to a Mozilla download for
/home/USERNAME/Downloads/thunderbird-115.4.1.tar.bz2 80.6 MB.
QUESTIONS

  1. Which of those three should I use, considering that I wish to end up with an ESR release, not a FastChanges channel
  2. Based on this research link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1425259 It seems to say that, once Firefox is set for ESR, any thunderbird will also be ESR??
    Thanks in advance.
2

This one.

The second option is the Flatpak version which will not meet your above criteria.

  • Flatpaks tend toward the Latest Available Version, which means it will upgrade regularly.
  • Flatpak sare containerized (sandboxed) and that can make them unable to communicate with the system or system installed applications, like Firefox.

You can use another app - Flatseal - to try granted more system permissions to a flatpak app. But... the easier route is to install the first APT version.

3

Neither Flathub nor Ubuntu delivers ESR releases of Thunderbird into their primary repositories AFAIK. You‘ll probably want to download an ESR release from their website.

In any other scenario, I would always recommend Flathub.

However, you can install specific versions of Flatpak packages from Flathub, so you could install the normal-release that you want and set it to hold updates, so that it gets excluded from automatic and manual updates.

4

Yes. If an apt version is available then that is always my choice.
But I have removed Snap and Flatpak, so that makes the decision easier. :smiley:

5

You could also take a look at Betterbird:

The Linux archive provides a tarball (tar.bz) of the application which will have to be extracted using Ark and then compiling. Is also available as flatpak but the tarball would avoid having to use that.

Actually, no need to compile. You might want to make a folder named betterbird on the desktop, extract the tarball into that folder and then right-click the terminal file named 'betterbird', run it from terminal as an executable and it will run on your desktop:

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6

@zabadabadoo Please share steps for disable snap & flatpack permanently.
like Linux Mint people, they make it disabled by default.

7

To save waiting:

sudo apt remove --purge snapd flatpak gnome-software-plugin-flatpak gnome-software-plugin-snap

will remove Snap and Flatpak as well as the extended plugins for the Software Store.

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8

After Thunderbird's latest update it started opening my browser and going to a site asking me to donate to Thunderbird. I didn't mind the opening screen of Thunderbird asking for a donation but opening my browser was getting too intrusive. I saw a post about Betterbird on the LM forum and people were going to it because of multiple problems with the updated Thunderbird.

I decided to try Betterbird and was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to set up. I now have it on my desktop with two email accounts with one of those accounts being my Gmail which I use just for junk stuff. I also have it set up now on my laptop with my main email account. So far I have had no problems at all with BetterBird. I highly recommend it.

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9

@Aravisian :+1: done with special Thanks!

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