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Comment by retrocryptid | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. It's hard to figure out who Canonical thinks its customers are now. I'm not a super-libre-pedant and am usually happy to run closed source driver blobs. But stock debian seems to be getting better with driver support and I probably should be more careful about the provenance of proprietary drivers. Seems like every week there's a reminder that I'm not Ubuntu's target market.

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AFAICT, Canonical's customers are cloud vendors and people who buy cloud services. The Linux desktop is, in that sense, just a hearts and minds investment for people who run linux workstations to manage their much larger linux server fleet. From that perspective, the investments in charm and snap on the desktop feel a bit like a sales pitch for their new cloud features. Which.... would be more effective if they didn't also make the user experience for FF emphatically worse.

And originally, Ubuntu was a high visibility demo piece for Launchpad. If it can manage the full build cycle for Debian, it can certainly handle your niche app.

Not only making the default FF experience emphatically worse but downright broken for some use cases.

I work in an environment where I have to auth to web services with a smart card. This is just not possible with Snap FF.

I'm guessing Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop customers are businesses that are using Ubuntu as a cheap Windows replacement. The IT departments who set up their OS probably just do the default install, so the minimal install option is just more code to maintain.

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