How to try out Thunderbird 60?

Solution 1:

You can just download the newest version here https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all/ Unpack it to a folder and click on executable "thunderbird". For me it found my profile automatically and I was able to have a look at the new version.

My old installation is not affected in anyway.

Solution 2:

Also, if you want your launcher to launch thunderbird 60 instead of 52, you will need to change the launcher path from thunderbird %u to wherever you saved it. In my case I saved it in ~/.local/share/ so my overall path was /home/username/.local/share/thunderbird/thunderbird

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop

Find Exec=thunderbird %u and change to Exec=/whereyousavedit/thunderbird %u

Then it will work perfectly. I'm assuming I will need to undo this once thunderbird 60 comes out in the repo, but this works for now.

Solution 3:

Thunderbird 60 is now available in the snap store https://snapcraft.io/thunderbird

It's still flagged as edge so you need to issue the following command to install it:

sudo snap install thunderbird --edge