Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" Takes Flight
techstrong.it
techstrong.it
That link seems to go to some proprietary application. The correct link is https://apps.gnome.org/Papers/
This seems like pretty miserable quality blogspam.
Better link: https://fridge.ubuntu.com/2025/04/17/ubuntu-25-04-plucky-puf...
PS I hear this release cycle thing quite a bit, what's the benefit? What software are you using that requires bleeding edge packages that can't be containerized?
I did try Debian YEARS ago and Firefox was out of date in quite a scary way. It's unclear to me if I did something wrong there, but badly out of date web browsers can also be quite scary. At the time, I never looked into and just went back to Ubuntu.
Was it missing updates, or was it just the ESR (LTS) version that only gets security (and maybe bug) fixes but is still maintained?
Debian unstable is bleeding edge. Tested snapshots of Debian testing are not. Containers have many of snaps' inconveniences and some of their own. And desktop environment and virtual machine software releases have often bug fixes and improvements I don't want to wait for 12 or 18 months longer.
For the core system I don't mind not having the latest version, and for the apps like 1Password, Tailscale, Firefox, Zed, VSCode, Ollama, Obsidian, Slack or Spotify (to name a few I use), I install them from upstream repo (or unpack into /opt) directly.
The only real constraint is kernel version, which may not have the drivers for the latest and greatest hardware, so new laptops might be a problem. I do use a snapless Ubuntu for that very reason on my laptop.
Ubuntu had hit the proverbial last straw for me when they started shipping even the dumbest things as snap: the fu--ing calculator. Opening the calculator (a 250kb binary) took 10-15 seconds because snap had to download the images, mount layers etc. I never hated a linux distro so much.
Debian was fine but very stale, and a lot of things i use every day were broken or non functional. Particularly Firefox and bluetooth stuff.
Fedora... It's just great. Software is fresh but very stable. Anything bluetooth works. Whole distro-upgrades don't break my system.
Updating Ubuntu basically always meant reinstalling everything. At some point i was going LTS to LTS.
I'm not going back to Debian/Ubuntu.
I've run a bunch of Linux distros since the late 90s. Pop is the sweet spot for me, so far.
It's a lil outdated but it's a rad lil distro.
I recently switched to Debian to get away from Ubuntu CONSTANTLY forcing the Firefox snap over the Deb I purposefully installed. It's fine but I keep running into little things like the kernel being too old for my GPU, missing codecs for Zoom, etc. It's a little irritating in that regard. I guess I could have picked Mint but it still had an older kernel so even then it wouldn't have been trouble free.
I would still be on Ubuntu if it just respected Firefox being a Deb. I tried many guides and times to get it to not use the snap and nothing worked on 24.04 so I gave up. I wouldn't even care if the snap version at least operated the same as the deb version.
install_firefox() {
source /etc/os-release
printf "Package: snapd
Pin: release a=\*
Pin-Priority: -10" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:mozillateam/ppa
sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install -y -t 'o=LP-PPA-mozillateam' firefox
printf "%s" "Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins:: \"LP-PPA-mozillateam:${UBUNTU_CODENAME}\";" | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/51unattended-upgrades-firefox
printf "Package: firefox\*
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 501" | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillateamppa
}
remove_snaps() {
sudo snap remove --purge firefox
sudo snap remove --purge snap-store
sudo snap remove --purge gnome-3-38-2004
sudo snap remove --purge gtk-common-themes
sudo snap remove --purge snapd-desktop-integration
sudo snap remove --purge bare
sudo snap remove --purge core20
sudo snap remove --purge snapd
sudo apt remove --autoremove snapd -y
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
# To prevent repository packages from triggering the installation of Snap,
# this file forbids snapd from being installed by APT.
# For more information: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html
Package: snapd
Pin: release a=*
Pin-Priority: -10
EOF
sudo umount /var/snap
}