Add Thunderbird Release branch to Flathub (and Snap)

[seasnail]

Thunderbird recently showed a notification suggesting to move from ESR branch to Release branch, pointing to this article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-release

The instructions for installing on Linux suggest Flatpak as the first install option, and my understanding is this is the preferred option? Currently only the ESR branch is available from Flathub (the flathub-beta repo also has the beta branch but not the release either). Snap (the second suggested install method) also lacks the release branch.

The only ways to get the release branch currently are by using a distro which packages it in their repo or by following the "Installing Thunderbird manually for a Specific Release Channel (For advanced users)" instructions, which isn't ideal.

Please could you add the release branch to Flathub (also Snap for people who use that)?

[Jon]

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[wsmwk]

Thanks for this info.

Just to be clear, what flavor of linux were you using when you go the notice?  

I'm asking because linux users should not have gotten the appeal.

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@wsmwk

Thanks for the response.

I'm using openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma (6.3.5) and Thunderbird from FlatHub.

The message popped up in the Plasma Notifications system tray widget on I think the 27th of May at about 23:00 UTC+1.

My Flatpak history seems to be empty oddly, but I update fairly frequently so I think I must have been using the version of Thunderbird from 2025-05-20, commit 5f7627686e2e2e30881c42a0c2ea8900f4f5096b151bdc4bcabc15d02cbdbca5 which I assume is 128.10.2esr. I think 128.11.0esr was released the next day on FlatHub so I'm pretty sure I couldn't have got that already.

I hope that's helpful, and thanks again for looking into it 🙂

[seasnail]

I just noticed the support article has been updated since I initially read it to add a note that it doesn't apply to Flatpak and Snap (and Microsoft Store), thanks for that it makes it a lot less confusing 🙂