This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Using same profile from Linux-Windows dual-boot doesn't work from Windows

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 9 views
  • Last reply by jediguy9

jediguy9
jediguy9
more options

I am using Arch Linux and Windows 10 (1909) and Thunderbird 68.3.0 on both. I had Windows installed first and created the Thunderbird profile on its NTFS partition. From Arch Linux, I then symlinked from .thunderbird and .cache/thunderbird to the corresponding AppData directories on Windows.

This setup seemed to work fine from Arch Linux, but when I boot back into Windows, I sometimes get an error saying, "You have launched an older version of Thunderbird: A newer version of Thunderbird may have made changes to your profile which are no longer compatible with this older version..." This isn't helpful as I have made sure to always use the same version of Thunderbird in both OSes.

It would be very convenient if I didn't have to make the profile all over again. Do you have any suggestions for how I could debug what is actually causing this error to occur so I can fix it? Thank you.

I am using Arch Linux and Windows 10 (1909) and Thunderbird 68.3.0 on both. I had Windows installed first and created the Thunderbird profile on its NTFS partition. From Arch Linux, I then symlinked from .thunderbird and .cache/thunderbird to the corresponding AppData directories on Windows. This setup seemed to work fine from Arch Linux, but when I boot back into Windows, I sometimes get an error saying, "You have launched an older version of Thunderbird: A newer version of Thunderbird may have made changes to your profile which are no longer compatible with this older version..." This isn't helpful as I have made sure to always use the same version of Thunderbird in both OSes. It would be very convenient if I didn't have to make the profile all over again. Do you have any suggestions for how I could debug what is actually causing this error to occur so I can fix it? Thank you.

All Replies (1)

jediguy9
jediguy9 Question owner
more options

A temporary solution was to delete the compatability.ini file within %APPDATA%/Thunderbird/<profile>.profile directory on Windows. The Arch Linux version of Thunderbird had a slightly later build date, and even though they should have the same revision, Windows didn't like that.