Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

AppImage and Flatpak are fine, and AppImage is the first choice amongst this "everything included" bundle formats.

However, Ubuntu is forcing snaps as a power move. Both the software, and the treatment from Canonical is off-putting a lot of enthusiasts right now.

Yeah, the year of the Linux desktop isn't coming, but it's not 2001 either. We've standardised onto a few technologies pretty much everyone adopt except the ones that want to be different: systemd, Flatpak being the most used cross-distro system, pulseaudio (and pipewire offers a 100%-compatible shim for it), dbus, NetworkManager and now finally with GNOME 42/libadwaita we can have even standardised UI design.

And like many other things frontend, things move at a pretty rapid pace. Ubuntu 18 is ancient, might be good for a server, but it's not a good idea to use that as a metric for where the Linux desktop is.

The nix language is indigestible for me, so I eye Guix System but so far Guix does not have things I like/need so still on NixOS in a calm state: systems updated, automated, reproducible without thinking and babysitting them continuously.

I use fedora since long time and so far is quite stable without any non-sense

In case you want some inspiration or to take an existing config and run, feel free to take a peek at or use mine: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config

Honestly after that I never tried it again.

Currently running manjaro but really wanna give fedora a try cos seems people who use it swear by it.

Ironically this is exactly the problem that snaps solve; what you describe is exactly why others complain about it.

[1] http://mpr.hunterwittenborn.com/

>scary-looking command lines that mess with cryptographic keys

>for a real Windows experience, install from a deb and hope you remember where you got it from when it needs an update

Yeah I guess you didn't use Windows recently cause that never happens there

Then for apps that have dotfile-type directories where you can put config files and other stuff, those simply exist in app-specific directories under .var in your home directory, so they're not difficult to find either.

Or use official PPAs for all the snaps that Canonical is forcing on users.

So far they are still kind of corporate free in the spirit of doing a desktop distribution keeping things as a normal or dev user would expect without pushing stupid changes in order to advance a corporate agenda.

Also, they are currently based on Ubuntu that they debloat but there is a debian based variant (LMDE) that show future perspectives if Ubuntu become not really usable anymore as a base in the future.

Example 1, Fedora ships with zram swap by default instead of allocating a separate swap partition. Basically it's compressed ram, good enough because when you start to swap your system is already on its knees, but orders of magnitude faster than reading from disk, and you don't need to allocate a separate partition.

Example 2, On Fedora when you format with / with btrfs, it'll enable a really fast zstd (level 1) compression on your volumes. It might save you a few gigabytes, it consumes a imperceptible amount of CPU time, and reduces the write amplification effects on SSDs and NVMe.

Fedora gives you these out of the box, while on Arch you have to be aware of them, and I bet you don't have any of these free wins enabled on your system.

I love Arch Linux, but Fedora is IMO a better desktop experience.

The process: no developer can interact with a vast community, there is too much noise. No developer can prune bad bugreports, poorly formed questions etc. The multi-level community can. No developer can alone design the best software, good interactions with other people expert enough to interact well can.

With the classic FLOSS model:

- developers just concentrate on their code, there is no noisy community pushing messages to them, there is no issues about packaging, distro-specific stuff etc to care about;

- packagers just grab code and package it for a distro they know so an easier task for them than for the developer that might know just another distro/OS;

- community interact users-with-users and users-with-packagers and packagers-with-packagers that's keep the noise low enough to all parties profit and makes ideas flow from a cohort to another, processed and adjusted at any passage.

The outcome is: all users get help, at a level no other system can give, all face easier tasks than others development models, developers get the best feedback possible, all involved interacts each others creating new ideas, resolving issues, improving.

In the "direct" model: devs do not care of distros, they give something to anyone, as a result community is so noisy that they can't get good feedback, patches, bugreports, they get some, but mixed with countless other bad to a point no one can keep up the information flow. Developers do not care much about deps they use, so, as you can easily see in the wild, most "packages" are full of old vulnerabilities no one care about. Various cohort of people involved are "isolated" between each other. There is no real community just a mechanical hierarchy unable to improve itself BUT able to be steered by big players who decide founding a developer or another what ideas will grow and what will be pushed into oblivion.

It's essentially the very same thing you see in our society, from the classic internet, with usenet, minitel, mailing lists and the modern platform era. In the modern era there are flock of sheep and some shepherd, in the classic era there were peoples, peer between peers. In the classic era innovation was a thing, nowadays nothing really new born and most things fall apart.

> What's the difference between an RPM package and a Flatpak package?

The level of crappiness. An RPM can't normally work alone, so for instance it should not run an old openssl vulnerable version just because the developer of a small chat client have no time nor interest to update it. A flatpak can and normally do: see actual repos, classic packaging systems tend to have all deps up to date, flatpak, appimages, snap tend to be abandonware from the day 0.

Also an rpm can package a kernel, the modern ones can't, but still need a distro to run. So the classic systems are complete, the new one can't exists alone, can't form a system.

They have exactly NO REASON to exists from the FLOSS or the end user point of view.

> In short: what are you talking about?

About the reality, just look around and see. If you can't see there are two options: you are inexperienced enough to not notice anything, perhaps inhabited to the commercial model "go to a website, download a program, install it" single app per single app with the system pre-installed by someone else or rarely installed by hand in a day-long manual and painful process. Or you have commercial interests. I see no other options.

Try to see NixOS or Arch repo, then see Snap, Flatpak, AppImage repos and compare them: what about the real freshness of them? What about the completeness and options? What's the outcome? Do you want a containerized chat client 158Mb instead of 2.5Mb due do the gazillion of copies of multiple version of same deps that when you exchange a file demand a long process to being able to see it with another application? Or do you prefer have no files at all, all on someone else computer, like Google Drive etc and you just run a WebVM "the endpoint must be just a dumb terminal of modern cloud-mainframe"? Because that's is.