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Comment by dissident_coder | Hacker News Reader

so if I want to avoid godawful snaps on Ubuntu with minimal fuss I need to use one of these?

Like 7 years ago I just went to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ and hit "Download". I got like a tar archive that I uncompressed into ~/firefox. Made a short cut to it on my tool bar. It has been auto updating fine ever since.

I did that as well, but it also means that the binaries can be modified by an exploit (running as a regular user). It's not a huge difference with the deb, but still, it's a small additional layer of security.

That's a pretty lousy take. Obviously, stuff that executes as your user act on your user data. Why would you even have a line of code that you don't trust on your machine? `chown` it if you care that much.

Also, to the parent comment -- you should be putting stuff in ~/.local anyway, not in the top-level home directory.

Does this work? Coworker of mine tried to replace the snap and said that Ubuntu removed the non-snap and installed the snap again. Or does it work because it's beta/dev?

(To add to this: Snap can go and die in the deepest layers of hell. What an awful "we have to be special" piece of 'technology')

This will make mozillateam's repo preferred over default "snapified":

   $ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox-ppa-pin-400 
   Package: \*
   Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
   Pin-Priority: 900

Thanks!

You can install it from their binary releases: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w...

I think if you do the "system" install, it won't be able to update itself, but the user install will be able to.

There's also a PPA: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Though you'll have to convince Ubuntu to prefer that instead of the snap. It's not hard, certainly easier than installing Debian which is probably still what I should have done. I think I used this guide: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-d...

Though what that doesn't tell you is that the snap install has its own profile folder location. So before you switch to one of the other install variants, note the location in about:support and make a copy of the folder. Running snap remove firefox will actually create a backup of the folder (unless you add --purge, so don't), which really saved my ass.

thanks, I'll give the user install a try

Skip Snaps and just run the AppImage for Librewolf here[0]. I like the way Librewolf removes all the telemetry crap and hardens the browser.

[0] https://librewolf.net/installation/linux/

That would do it, or do this: https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2022/03/21/how-to-fix-firef...

Yeah, or you switch over to Linux Mint and get a snap-free Ubuntu-based distro.

You can easily remove snapd:

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/snap-remove-disable

Or use one of the 500 linux distros out there or build your own.

Linux doesnt force you to use one path. My reply is not meant to sarcastic I am just bringing to your attention that you absolutely have alternatives, because linux is cool - ubuntu included.

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