Thunderbird 115 has been out over a week now and the lack of packaged versions, especially Flatpak, is beginning to raise eyebrows. Gotta admit, I’ve been curious at the lack of a Flatpak version since the day they announced it’s “availability”.
An article:
https://www.webpronews.com/thunderbird-leaves-linux-users-waiting-for-much-hyped-version-115/
Linux Cast episode:
I think thunderbird always delay major version upgrade until
<version>.2.If you observe their changelog:
115.0: only offer binary download, not as upgrade
102.0: only offer binary download, not as upgrade
102.1.2: only offer binary download, not as upgrade
102.2: no such disclaimer
They also has the same disclaimer for 91.x, that’s how Thunderbird decided to distribute update.
They do progressive roll-out. With last year’s update the Flatpak also waited for the to say “this is stable enough, ship it”
deleted by creator
Showed up in the Pop! Shop today too. 👍
I don’t think a week is that long to wait for an open source project like this. I suspect as soon as they released 115 they got a deluge of bug reports that are probably keeping them occupied.
Granted, I’m not personally affected because <smug>I use Arch btw</smug>. But on a serious note, it makes sense to me that “bleeding edge” distros where users expect the latest versions quickly would package Thunderbird for their repos, whereas those on more stability-focused distros would wait the couple of weeks for the Flatpak.
I know Gentoo has it masked for testing with this note, which is probably the same reason why other distros without the same mechanism don’t have it at all:
Testing. An upgrade from 102 isn’t recommended due to downgrading most likely not being possible. Back up your profile before attempting. Fresh install should be fine. Bug #910229
Eh, I don’t at flatpak or snap unless I have no other choice, but i get why it would be annoying to have the delay.
That being said, I wouldn’t be concerned until almost a month. It’s a big update that’s going to need more debugging than usual. Makes sense to hold back for a bit.
Eh, I don’t at flatpak or snap unless I have no other choice
I thought the same until I discovered that Flatpak gives me the power to restrict apps in their permissions, similar to firejail, but less cumbersome. Since then I actually prefer Flatpak over traditional packages (I even switched to Fedora Silverblue), as I have a global override that, for example, revokes permission to access the root of my home directory or to use the X11 display server.
This allows me to keep a clean home directory, as applications are prevented from writing into my home directory (configuration files then automatically get stored in the Flatpak directory ~/.var instead) or, even worse, into executable files, such as ~/.bashrc. I can also be confident that applications use Wayland, if they support it, and not a less secure display server (X11). Applications that don’t support Wayland yet can either be made to run under Wayland (Chromium / Electron) or I have to grant those applications permission to actually use an X11 server (Bottles / WINE, Steam).
On the other hand you can also opt into punching as many holes as possible into the sandbox, for example by granting applications the permission to access a local shell. That might be necessary for development tools, such as VSCodium. The thing I like about Flatpak is that it offers this kind of flexibility and you can decide on a per-application basis which system resources the application can or can not access.
Sure, the permission model isn’t perfect (e. g. D-Bus access), but for my use-case it is a huge improvement and it gives me more flexibility with selecting my distribution, as I can get the very same up-to-date applications anywhere via Flatpak.
