Recently helped someone recover their old Thunderbird mail profile on a computer. We tried to add new accounts to this profile so they could see their old mail and new mail accounts at the same time, and Thunderbird would have none of it – likely some obscure bug where new versions of Thunderbird will not work properly with profiles created with old versions of Thunderbird. We can say – “This should NOT be!”, but on the other hand, why should we expect authors of an excellent OSS product that we don’t pay for to test their software with profiles created by every previous version going back to who knows when. If you use open source software that requires the use of a long lived data set (email, Wordpress, Gitea, etc), I think your best bet is to update regularly and keep current. Then migrations in data formats have the best chance of working. If you try to jump too large a gap, there is more chance something will go wrong, no matter how carefully the developers wrote their migration code. I’ve run through dozens of Wordpress and Gitea updates in recent years and have had no problems.
Some work under the idea that once they find a computer system that works for them, they don’t ever want anything to change. There is sometimes a fear that updates may break things. Yes, this does occasionally happen, however I think the drawbacks of not updating are worse:
- will run into problems with long lived datasets (email, anything with a database, etc).
- more chances of security problems
- larger change in features that are harder to adapt to than smaller changes more often
- you miss out on new features/bug fixes. Generally new releases work better.
There are always exceptions to the above, but generally I’ve found keeping up to date works better for me. This is one reason rolling distros like Arch Linux work so well – they keep everything in your system up to date. Even distros like Ubuntu are reasonable with releases every 6mo. However, operating systems like Windows and commercial software like MS Office are a major pain for most users as things change a lot on major updates; thus, the aversion of many users to updating their software.
Anyway, Windows or Linux, if you run Thunderbird, keep it up to date!