Comment by guiambros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guiambros | Hacker News Reader

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> Firefox is now only provided in Ubuntu as a snap. Some benefits include...

I haven't tested 22.04 yet, but it seems it's coming with snap by default, and some (many?) packages will be available exclusively via snap. It was already the case with Chromium, but with this launch it seems Firefox and others will follow suit.

That's a shame. I've been a loyal Ubuntu user for over a decade, but snap is a hill I'm ready to die on, for the various reasons listed in this years-long centi-thread [1]. So 20.04 will likely be my last ubuntu-flavored distro.

I know gnome doesn't have many fans around here, but any suggestions of gnome-based distro that are also deb-based? I'm considering pure Debian, but not sure how polished it really is. Pop!_OS is another option, and I'm using it on a secondary machine to test, but it has a small community, and not sure about the developer's commitment with its long term maintenance.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1575053

Yeah. I wanted to like snap (Easy sandboxing for all users? great!) but at least when I've tried it, it has some annoying problems:

1. The way it installs stuff in the background is confusing and opaque. Apt is 1,000 years old and well-understood, but if snap breaks, I can't easily find the fix on SO.

2. The snap version of Chromium passes its own argument for the user profile directory, so I can't run multiple instances of Chromium in separate profiles. If I try, it just opens a new tab in the only profile directory snap allows. Maybe they fixed this, but it's super-annoying.

3. They are pushing it for stuff like cmake where I can't possibly imagine the benefit. Maybe they just want their own non-Debian package manager?

4. If they wanted to break with tradition so badly, why couldn't they accept something cool like Guix...

I have a green-blue rootfs setup and I'm trying to figure out if there's a clever way I can manually install Mint or Debian on that blue rootfs without having to 'burn' and plug in a USB drive.

In regards to 3, I think that's exactly what canonical is doing. It feels like they want to insert their own IP into mainstream Linux just like Red Hat has (more successfully) done and benefit from this somehow.

The way that they don't open source the snap store (server side) so they're the only ones that can run it is another clue. They always seem to be up to something in this regard. Upstart, mir, unity. Now snap.

Firefox on Snap is broken. The sandboxing prevents some Firefox extensions from working properly, including the one that allows you to install GNOME Shell extensions from https://extensions.gnome.org (the only official way to install GNOME Shell extensions). They've known about this for years, and still went ahead and removed the option to install Firefox from the APT repositories in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+... (The bug also affects snap Chromium, hence the bug title)

> So 20.04 will likely be my last ubuntu-flavored distro.

I'm hanging on with 22.04 using the mozillateam PPA to get a proper deb firefox and it's working fine for now. If they stop exposing that option I'll be off too.

I'm not religiously against snap but the experience of trying to use it has been pretty awful so far. First the process of switching firefox to a snap during release-upgrade hung and broke the upgrade. Then after clearing up the mess and uninstall/reinstalling, attempting to run Firefox silently did nothing.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu but removes any and all snap functionality. There is also Linux Mint Debian Edition which is the same as regular LM, but based on Debian instead.

I left Ubuntu specifically because of the Firefox on snap. I had to use an ethernet cable to install Debian due to wifi firmware issues, but once I moved to testing and included non-free wi-fi worked.

The only complaint I have is the way BT is handled, but this might be a kernel issue, or a gnome one.

Having hopped around different Debian-based systems, BT worked more or less problematically as a function of the kernel they were using. Ranging from "No problem, plug-and-play" to "erratic".

More generally, you could give Linux Mint a try if you liked what Ubuntu used to be. Their mainline version is based on Ubuntu, but with a specific pledge to not go down the snap road. They have many other great improvements as well.

Linux Mint also has a specific Debian edition called LMDE, where they basically reproduce the Ubuntu-based version in case they need to jump ship one day, if Ubuntu decides to go down an un-acceptable rabbit hole.

I considered pure debian too but it doesn't have as long support as Ubuntu LTS. And release upgrades are difficult in my experience. Ubuntu do-release-upgrade works pretty well. I'm also a bit stuck for the long term server distro thing which is the only thing I still use Ubuntu for.

They defaulted to Firefox via snap a few releases ago. It takes ~ages to launch compared to a native binary.

To be clear, this is the first Ubuntu release where Firefox is not available in the APT repositories. You can't uninstall the snap Firefox and install Firefox from the APT Ubuntu repositories any more.

So having NFS homefolder is not an option any more I suppose, since snap just doesn't work with it (unless user is willing to run everything on root)

Is there an unofficial repo where you can install it from perhaps?

There is: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Thanks!

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