Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu
old.reddit.comThere's a very strong reaction here from users, but overall if more software became snap-only (or FlatPak-only, or anything-only), it would solve one of Linux's biggest pain points as a software developer.
MSI on Windows is completely fucked, PKG on Mac has a few footguns, but at least they're universal, decades-old standards supported by mature tooling. You release an MSI/PKG, and you're done. Works on every Windows/Mac system, no issues.
On Linux, an OS with 3% market share, there are more competing standards to count: Deb, RPM, snap, FlatPak, AUR, AppImage and probably a dozen other semi-popular ones. Every individual user has their opinion (and they'll voice it!) as to which standard is the best. At best, this leads to God knows how many man-hours of duplicated work packaging and QAing. At worst, it leads to the dev abandoning the thought of Linux altogether.
Linux on Desktop simply can't move forward by continued bike-shedding over frankly irrelevant details. Even if the only rationale for a standard is "Because Mike Shuttleworth said so, and he got a phone call from Mandela in space", that's a massive improvement over the current status quo.
> it would solve one of Linux's biggest pain points as a software developer.
Maybe true for proprietary software, but for FLOSS it is a non issue once your software has traction and gets picked up by distributions. I wrote a piece of open source in ~2002 and it is still found in pretty much all distros AND I never spend a minute in pain over packaging difficulties.
IMHO, the basic package managers work REALLY well for FLOSS. The gave me a peak into the AppStore/PlayStore(tm) experience (but then without all the spyware), waaaaay before they even existed.
Having N distributions repeat almost identical packaging work on different schedules and sometimes falling many versions behind is not a "non issue". You're excusing something Linux is genuinely bad at. I say this as someone using it personally and professionally for 12+ years.
Sure some distros have many derivatives, but it's not obvious to me that you can stop that (see Android for a different open-source ecosystem, and how fractured that is), nor that is always a bad thing, as it allows experimentation which can flow up to the parents.
I'm not sure though "almost identical packaging work" is accurate, maybe that applies to Debian and Fedora (and their derivatives), but Gentoo and Nix are examples of doing something quite different (not to mention the different embedded distros), and so the "duplicate work" is anything but that.
Also I was replying to:
> it would solve one of Linux's biggest pain points as a software developer.
Not the pain of the distro-people. That may be mitigated with a universal standard of snap or flatpak.
Snap is not a standard, and never will be (RedHat will always ship flatpak for example). So Snap is no universal solution.
At the same time snap packages have serious downsides for end users.
I think this comment demonstrates the parent’s point.
Before every distro had their own package management system and repository.
Then 99% went with Flatpak, except one, Ubuntu with their own proprietary solution called snap.
It's not the same thing. We have a decent (yeah not perfect, I'll spare commenters the effort of posting that same old tired flatpak rebuttal) cross distro packaging solution, but Canonical always wants to play different and not collaborate with the other standards. So here we are.
You can also just install Flatpak on Ubuntu and never think about Snap ever again if you so choose. Someone putting forth effort to maintain their own bespoke repository isn't really that big a deal.
In 10 years the "Ubuntu Store" will be a pretty frontend on top of Flatpak just like Gnome Software, and just like every NIH Canonical product made before it.
Unless you want Firefox or some other apps where the deb package is a thin frontend around a snap install command.
Fair criticism, but wouldn't you be installing the Flatpak versions of those apps anyway? I get the loss of the distro-provided builds but in abstract I can't find some fundamental reason distros can't drop packages from their repos.
I'd rather a package report as `does-not-exist` and suggest I install it from snap over it installing it silently from snap without my input
What 99%? Fedora, Mint, eOS, Pop use Flatpak. Ubuntu (and derivatives other than aforementioned ones) and Solus use Snap. In every other distro, including but not limited to popular ones like Debian, SUSE, Slackware, Arch, Void, Gentoo, both are optional. Neither Flatpak nor Snap is standard.
Well, no. The parent point was that Snap is a way out of this software packaging quagmire, but I am saying that Snap will never unify the linux distros.
A snap has Ubuntu-specific package dependencies. That's totally not a cross-platform concept. The only thing snap solves is sandboxing, but there are better ways to do that.
> Ubuntu-specific package dependencies
Could you briefly summarize those for us?
> On Linux, an OS with 3% market share, there are more competing standards to count: Deb, RPM, snap, FlatPak, AUR, AppImage and probably a dozen other semi-popular ones.
AUR is explicitly a community-driven effort. The others are packing standards, some of which (like DEB and RPM) are also used in community-driven efforts. Debian and RedHat derivatives have repositories that use DEB and RPM, respectively. There's not a lot of bike-shedding, here. Availability of functional software is a pretty big feature of Linux distributions.
And there is a big difference between those community efforts and the likes of Snap, AppImage, and FlatPack, which are developer-centric. User preferences on software distribution aren't always or even usually based on irrelvent arguments, but fundamental ones. The community efforts centralize dealing with compatibility and, to an extent, security with community standards, while the developer-centric model largely leaves this work to software developers alone. This is a meaningful distinction.
DEB is working fine for most users, for the corporate/Fedora users RPM also is good enough. Flatpak works great for GUI applications as well, it integrates nicely with most "app store" interfaces on Linux.
DEB vs RPM is an ancient debate, each comes with its pros and cons. Flatpak and Snap try to solve a different problem (sandboxing + dependency hell vs stable system-wide dependencies).
MacOS has PKG, but most software I've seen actually comes through DMG images or ZIP files. Windows has MSI, which, if you use it correctly, actually elegantly solves most problems; the features that were added to allow developers to bypass the declarative installation process are what usually breaks MSI installers.
But then modern Windows now features has packages installed through .appx, .appxbundle, .msix, .msixbundle, and plain old .exe. Windows Mobile (based on Windows CE) had .cab; Windows Phone 8/8.1 (based on Windows 8) had .xap; Windows 10 Mobile had .appx. Now Windows 11 also supports .apk files from Android!
In the end, the package method doesn't matter. Users don't care where the package comes from, they just want to install the application and run it. Deb, Flatpak, RPM and Snap all work fine from tools like Discover or GNOME Software; it really doesn't matter to normal users what kind of packaging system they use.
Everybody I know strongly dislikes snap because of the machinery it brings and how untidy it is. Also it's forced upon the users.
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.
The devil on my shoulder wonders if Canonical's pushing of Snap, rather than adoption of FlatPak, is another instance of the Not-Invented-Here organizational dysfunction that led it to slog on with its own Bazaar SCM rather than switch to Git (or Mercurial).
Bazaar, Upstart, Mir, Snap. Canonical really likes to do their own thing and usually it fails in the end. Competing implementations are great but competing standards only make more work for everyone else.
The worst part is that they sabotage their good software by insisting on these bad solutions. LXD and MicroK8s for example, are distributed only as snaps - not even tarballs. LXD is actually a great software. But it's available as native package only on a few less popular distributions, and that has hurt its adoption. I wanted to try MicroK8s, but completely abandoned it due to the snap requirement.
Snap server is closed-source (unless anything has changed?), so I believe this is more likely to be a nefarious intent to create a dependency on their service (which Canonical can monetize later) than a mere dysfunction
The thing is, none of the mainstream package formats solve the underlying problem, they just push it to a different layer.
I know what I’m saying can be regarded as “+1 different standards”, but Nix is the only truly novel approach to package management that can reliably install a huge-ass behemoth package group like Gnome, install Plasma next to it and remove both without a single garbage file laying around afterwards.
I think we really should embrace this uniquely good solution.
Nix fails the "don't make me think" test unfortunately. Flatpak is winning because you can head-empty dump a working application into it and it will work. Nix requires discipline on the part of the packager which will never scale.
Indeed - and they provide separation between a stable OS (which debs are fine for) and frequent desktop app updates. I've been using Snap, Flatpak and Appimage for desktop/productivity apps (Krita, DigiKam, Spotify, Signal, calibre etc) where possible. Its been amazing getting updates in a timely fashion, sometimes straight from the developer, instead of having to wait years for the DEBs to be updated.
This is really overcomplicating it. Most mainstream end user Linux programs - including Firefox [0] - are distributed through archives you just unpack and run the binary inside, same as most Windows freeware. AppImages are just self-extracting versions of this. Most of the other formats you mention are for distro package managers - these aren't distribution formats and it's not the responsibility of the program authors to package for every distro, nor is it required for a package to be in repositories for people to run it.
Just ship an ELF binary in an archive. Include any files and libraries you need. Compile against the oldest glibc found in any system you care about supporting. That's all you need.
[0] https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/relea...
Comparing Windows and macOS to Linux is moot and we should stop doing it. Linux has always been and will continue to be an ecosystem driven by various communities, and expecting everyone to agree on the same standards is silly.
The sooner we all begin treating Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as separate Operating Systems the sooner we can all move on from the "single standard" and "Linux on Desktop" debates. As an application vendor I always find it amusing when customers ask if we support Linux. My response is no, we don't support Linux but we do support Ubuntu 18+ and RHEL 8. Linux distros are so wildly different these days, not just in software but in ideologies, that this distinction is important, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Not in 2022 they're considered different Operating Systems. People have been developing AppImage, Flatpak and snap for a reason. They're being used and it's a thing.
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.
I'm willing to bet that desktop linux's market share is not going to move one way or another with any packaging format changes. The best hope currently is steam deck, which may bring a new generation of users to linux, although in a pretty limited capacity.
I would be fine with Firefox packaged as snap. If snap would have the decency of working fine with the typical configuration used in managed systems (NFS home mounts, LDAP auth and similar stuff). But it doesn't. Until that day, snap is as bad as any other deployment technique.
Okay but snap sucks. I don't want it. I never asked for it.
This is why my daily driver isn't Ubuntu (or Debain, because I also hate apt - it also sucks).
There's an XKCD that captures that: https://xkcd.com/927/
Related:
How to Fix Firefox Crashes on Ubuntu 21.10+ https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2022/03/21/how-to-fix-firef...
> ..The snap version of Firefox currently suffers from several problems that can lead to a bad user experience, including crashes.
Their recommendation is to backup everything (bookmarks, settings), remove the snap, and install via apt or self-contained zip.
I don't like this at all. The Firefox snap has really bad crashing issues, and the filesystem sandbox makes using the file picker confusing especially for my nontechnical family members.
I tried using the snap, I really gave it an honest attempt, and it stinks. The final straw was when removing and reinstalling the snap deleted my Firefox profile. That was really unacceptable. Removing Firefox via apt doesn't wipe out ~/.mozilla
Snapd is now removed and pinned with negative priority on my Ubuntu systems so it will never be installed.
I'd like to find a PPA that builds vanilla Firefox but so far I've only come across ESR and Beta.
I've considered switching to Chromium over this nonsense though I'll try running tarball Firefox first, I didn't realize it could update itself. Maybe Librewolf is an option too.
Try abrowser from the Trisquel apt repo. It is a firefox rebuild with a few tweaks for privacy.
I don’t think I’ll ever use ubuntu again. The continued forcing of snap is killing it for me.
I installed Ubuntu a few weeks ago at work because most people use it and there is some existing infrastructure around it (mostly for the target platforms, but could also be for dev machines).
I have to say that coming from Arch, it's a very Windowsy experience: lots of software has to be installed by searching for "install XYZ on Ubuntu", and following some instructions that involve scary-looking command lines that mess with cryptographic keys and add repos to my configuration, or, for a real Windows experience, install from a deb and hope you remember where you got it from when it needs an update.
I know the AUR is no more secure than that, but at least if someone makes a bogus package full of evil, it'll be flagged on that platform. If I install whatever from some random third-party repo, how will I ever know if it's gone bad?
Also, PKGBUILDs are just so easy.
I also come from Archlinux. A few months ago I discovered the mpr repository [1]. It is essentially the same as the AUR bit for Ubuntu. The syntax is also the same as the AUR packages, so it is super easy to port a package to Ubuntu. I highly recommend it.
> lots of software has to be installed by searching for "install XYZ on Ubuntu", and following some instructions that involve scary-looking command lines that mess with cryptographic keys and add repos to my configuration, or, for a real Windows experience, install from a deb and hope you remember where you got it from when it needs an update.
Ironically this is exactly the problem that snaps solve; what you describe is exactly why others complain about it.
Snap wouldn't be facing such a big backlash if it solved those problems without adding a whole lot of others. Even worse, they completely ignore better alternatives that exist.
>very Windowsy experience
>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
Googling for an exe or msi installer is fundamentally the same thing. Unless it's in the Windows Store, which it probably isn't.
Once installed, unless it has it's own phone-home for updates, you won't know if it's out of date.
To be fair googling for an exe is even worse. At least the weird apt incantations can be easily audited and understood by a proficient user, whereas on Windows you're running a binary downloaded from the Internet that you know is going to ask for superadmin permission to do its thing.
A third-party repo is the same: it's also an "Internet binary".
The AUR is slightly different in that (usually, there are some binary packages) you could in principle check the sources and build process before building it right there and then installing to the system with elevated privileges.
Same here.
Strongly eyeing NixOS and patiently awaiting real work experience from a co-worker who already did the plunge.
I jumped in several months ago and haven't really regretted it. The caveat being that you have to be okay with learning Nix (the language), debugging with only arcane error messages to go off of, and reading a lot of the config source because documentation is vast but shallow. If you feel like you're willing to make the tradeoff, then it is a blast and you'll be surprised you ever lived without Nix.
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
Time ago, when OpenSolaris dead I've switched to Ubuntu, until Unity (WM) was there it was good enough, after they took "the enterprise path", I'm on NixOS, there are a bit of annoyances to run unpackaged binaries but the rest work like a charm AND it's fully reproducible AND creating a custom iso is just the config + a oneliner, so deploy a personal desktop/homeserver is as easy as deploy in an enterprise automated infra without the burden of it.
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.
It is to operating systems what automatic memory management was to programming. Irrefutably needed.
The analogy is even more apt due to nix basically having a garbage collector (packages no longer available from any installed package, profile)
I got interested in NixOS after watching https://youtu.be/LA8KF9Fs2sk and https://youtu.be/ubDMLoWz76U
I use fedora since long time and so far is quite stable without any non-sense
I moved to PopOS for exactly this reason and have no regrets. Essentially Ubuntu with Flatpak.
I ran into weird issues with pop. I don’t think it’s a pop issue. I forget the exact issue but I was trying to install a couple of applications and I couldn’t because it said it was only for Ubuntu. I ended up hacking some file changing the name of the OS from Pop to Ubuntu and it installed and worked fine.
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.
Mint is probably a good alternative. It's based on Ubuntu but they don't even allow snap to be installed by default.
It has been a great alternative. And Firefox ESR (it's not in the repo anyway) also works great in 20.3 (and no doubt in LMDE).
I hope Neon (a non Ubu-family derivative of Ubuntu) is going to make a stance against snap. They can become a place of refuge for snap haters.
In the same vein I installed openSuse Thumbleweed and Fedora; as I'm looking for a way out. I hope Fedora allows me to install all opensource packages without Flatpack or I also ditch them. BTW Fedora's F35 installer has a horrible partition configurator, worst experience in two decades of installing Linux.
... on our systems we removed snapd on purpose, because we only have problems with it (we have NFS-mounted homes, and many snap packages don't work in this configuration)... now Firefox on snap doesn't sound good for us.
Snap gives all kind of headaches. I remember trying VSCode and I had problems working with files normally. I asked for help and I got quite a bit of backlash because I didn't wan't to deal with another layer of configuring a system just to access to my local files, and even after that you won't get the same experience.
But apparently I'm some bastard n00b that does not care about security enough! Can you imagine trying to access your files from your editor like you've been doing for decades? This guy doesn't get it!
Apparently flatpak et al have the same problems.
In my case, I'm not sure where to switch. I want easy of use, I don't really enjoy meddling with the OS. I use Xubuntu because it works better out of the box for me, but if I have to deal with this, I'm not interested.
I don't know what kind of hoops Snap require to access files. Flatpak, however, has a pretty simple system for a fully sandboxed app to open a file or a directory: it just opens a file or directory picker, you pick a file or directory, and the app gets access to that file or directory without getting access to anything outside what you picked. Behind the scenes this is done via the XDG Portal system, but that's irrelevant to the end user who only sees a normal file open dialog.
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.
> Flatpak, however, has a pretty simple system for a fully sandboxed app to open a file or a directory: it just opens a file or directory picker, you pick a file or directory, and the app gets access to that file or directory without getting access to anything outside what you picked.
Unfortunately that still breaks any kind of multi-file format, where opening one file might implicitly require accessing additional other files, and in some cases those additional files might even be distributed all over the directory hierarchy.
Snaps use exactly the same system with the same underlying APIs. An app that uses XDG Portals will work seamlessly when packaged as a snap, too.
VSCode was the one that made me uninstall snapd on the installation image for our classroom...
Yeah, it's a mess. I guess that for other casual apps it's less hassle.
I couldn’t save files from Firefox to an NFS-mounted folder inside of my home directory with the snap version. I would have figured that was something that wouldn’t make it through testing.
My impression is that many configurations not commonly used by home users (but used by power users, schools, companies, etc.) are not properly tested in Ubuntu. In the past we had a lot of problems with pam_unix2, which was the only module at that time which could properly handle NIS passwords and password changes, we ended up recompiling the package as there no reactions to bug reports...
I'll take a counter approach. it makes sense to install firefox via snap.
firefox breaks if you overwrite its files. therefore installing "normall" via dpkg is bad while firefox is in use (especially on a multi user system). running via a container ensures that the existing running processes don't break while allowing you to upgrade and have any new instance get the new version.
there are reasons to dislike snap, but the usage of containers (even as simply a packaging mechanism, not any form of isolation) can improve user experience.
Same, I have been using snap to run Firefox and Chromium for about more than a year (personal usage, not professional), and rarely had issues. I had one issue regarding a feature like WebGL or a file picker, but it was solved after 5 minutes of googling, and it was about running a single command line to give more permissions to the snap package. This way of distribution works quite well for big applications with many dependencies that you want to be automatically updated without fear of breaking some shared libraries.
I also feels more confident trying new applications with snap. I know I can easily install different versions and uninstall them without breaking the system.
> Canonical and Mozilla are working together to make the firefox snap the only supported package in Ubuntu, thus deprecating the deb package in the archive.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/19620...
Also in that thread:
> This was ultimately Mozilla's decision as part of the redistribution agreement. Mozilla could have just pulled it from being redistributed at all. This was the only way they were willing to allow Firefox to be redistributed as part of Ubuntu.
which seems at least odd (if not contradictory), given that Mozilla and Linux Mint have partnered to distribute Firefox as deb package, compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777066 .
Native messaging (which I use for my password manager) is broken. Screen sharing is broken. File picking/saving is hit and miss. It takes longer to start. My list of disks in bottom is riddled with random snap mounts.
This is what made me switch off ubuntu.
Whoa! That's enough showstoppers for me. Where did you switch to?
When Ubuntu dropped 32-bit support, I relatively easily switched my old 32-bit netbook from Ubuntu to Debian (by changing the sources and some manual fiddling with packages). OTOH, I'm using Fedora on my work computer, just for the fun of it, and I'm really satisfied with it.
I generally use arch now because I like tinkering. If I didn't I'd probably use either debian or fedora.
I've been hearing good things about modern Fedora as an alternative "boring" operating system. Maybe now is the time to make the switch.
I've used Fedora as my day-to-day OS for data work and web dev for the last few years. It just works with my ThinkPad, looks great (recent GNOME with Wayland is really polished) and RPMs for any tools you might need are usually available.
Any problems I have had have been with my desktop machine and I blame Nvidia 100%.
More obvious choice for an Ubuntu user would be Debian or another direct debian derivative wouldn't it?
I would highly recommend Linux Mint as an alternative. (Cinnamon has my preference)
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.
Do they take a stance against snap?
They're against it; see for example https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906
tnx, good to know.
then it's just my pref for KDE that holds me back :)
I'm a kde user as well, and since I'm on ubuntu and thinking about switching to something else I did a quick search to see if it was possible to run kde on mint and it appears you can. You have to add the kubuntu backports ppa ("sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports") and then you can install kde using apt ("sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop").
I haven't tried this, so I don't know if it actually works well or not, but it is apparently possible.
I would go for Debian or Gentoo.
Or use official PPAs for all the snaps that Canonical is forcing on users.
Not sure official Mozilla PPA is going to ship debs.
Makes it easy then, simply ignore Mozilla. It's not like there are no alternatives.
Pretty much all package managers work the same. Learning dnf when you know apt isn't that big of a deal.
Perhaps, but I use plenty of other Linux distros (at least on servers) for work, so I don't imagine it being a big deal to switch. It's more the inertia stopping me from switching _at all_, rather than any concern about how big the switch would be.
Personally recommend openSuse Leap as a boring distro, if you want a bit less boring Tumbleweed is great.
I tried to install both, F35's installer made it virtually impossible to configure my partitions. And that for such a mainstream distro.
I've also had this experience with the Fedora partition configurator. FWIW, you can somewhat get around it by manually creating the partition layout you want (LUKS+LVM+RAID etc), then mounting it as you'd want to use it, then just selecting it from within the partition manager.
This is also the only way I've found to do it with Ubuntu's installer, but once it's set up it works fine.
Question regarding Fedora : I tried it in a docker environment. During some googling to troubleshoot issues, several results were found on the Red Hat commercial support website (so, not accessible). I'm afraid that a good part of advanced/niche documentations and knowledge base for troubleshooting is behind Red Hat commercial support. Is that the case in practice?
Fedora has official docs (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/docs/), and in practice I've never had a need for the commercial RHEL support. Honestly, I've been using Fedora for 3 years now and can't even remember the last time I had to dig into the docs to troubleshoot something.
I'm a power user and have been using Fedora for over 10 years. I'd highly recommend it, and I don't recall ever getting the feeling that the support/info I needed was gated behind commercial RHEL.
I faced the same problems with some of RH's other software. It felt like they make software needlessly complicated and then hide the troubleshooting information behind paywalls in the hopes of landing support contracts.
Fedora is really great, but it is a bit bleeding edge in that there are lots of updates all the time. I have found Arch with an LTS kernel (I use older hardware) to be about similar in terms of stability.
I love Arch Linux, the issue I have with it is that you have to be aware of some very useful and little known configurations that can make your life easier or your performance better.
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.
If you want a more "LTS" like Fedora you can stay one release behind. The previous release is still supported with security updates.
Is upgrading every two versions supported?
Fedora releases are officially supported for 1 year. If you stay one version behind current you still are supported (although you still need to upgrade every 6 months). This is what I do on my home server. My workstation is currently on 35, and my server is on 34. When 36 comes out I'll upgrade my workstation to 36 and my server to 35.
I still have a 6 month upgrade cycle on my server, but I don't need to deal with package updates changing things.
If you want stable Ubuntu, take a loot at RHEL. You can get it for free with developer license and it's as stable as it gets.
Is Rocky Linux practical yet? Is it as all-there as CentOS was?
I've used Fedora as my daily driver for over a decade. I rarely have issues and the past few years have been particularly stable. It just works.
Switched to Fedora after a few years of hopping from different Ubuntu-based distros and I never looked back. Only problem that's most frustrating is Wayland.
Fedora is very leading edge.
Conversely Linux Mint has agreed for Mozilla to provide debs directly for Mint. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4244
Good that I am not using Mint - I prefer to have a real packager who cares about my interests between Mozilla and my Firefox install.
You can use the snap for Firefox in Mint, it's just not the default.
The Firefox snap is also maintained by Mozilla.
I generally try to keep a pretty open mind about new approaches to traditional systems, and I think it's honestly pretty obvious that there is scope for a whole new approach to distributing applications on Linux platforms.
All of that said, snaps are unfortunately not a good solution. The implementation sucks, the tooling sucks, the distribution channels suck. Ubuntu Core is an abomination. The lack of ability to control updates or publish a private repository are basically unforgivable and obvious manipulations of the platform. I don't think it's possible to say too many bad things about how bad the ecosystem is generally and how poorly Canonical have behaved.
The whole situation honestly sucks, because there there really is a need for a comprehensive and open solution for the challenges that the "snap" ecosystem is trying to address. All it's currently managing to do is get me off of Ubuntu as quickly as possible, which is probably not the goal.
I've been using NixOS for several years and one of the pain points was frequently updating software - the updates don't come out until the package definitions get updated. Last year I just started using Flatpak for those packages and it works a treat - plus, I can keep the proprietary, non-free software that I need out of my system config, which I like. Snap is a non-starter, and while I hope more software shows up properly, reproducibly packaged for Nix, Flatpak is the next best thing.
I really wish nix or guix had a flatpak export capability. Guix can already export several types of images like tarballs, docker images and squashfs images.
Flatpak works on guix. Just guix install it and then run the Firefox or any flatpak as usual using flatpak run
That's not what I meant. I wish for guix or nix to be a way to build flatpaks.
I get the hate against snaps. I tried really hard to give them a chance, but in my experience it’s a generally poor user experience. What I don’t get is why people feel like they need to leave Ubuntu because of it. Flatpak et al. work just as well on Ubuntu as anything else. Simply not using snaps on Ubuntu seems like a simpler solution than abandoning the distro altogether (assuming you don’t distro hop for fun).
There is something to be said for leaving a platform if you do not like the direction it seems to be headed in, even if you could compensate for the issues in the short term. Otherwise you might sign up for years of incrementally increasing misery.
Once Windows installed updates against their users' preference I switched my main desktop to Linux – this was a significant amount of work but has saved me a lot of frustration over the past years. Similarly, once I experienced UI stutter in Gnome and noticed that it moved towards Javascript, I switched to i3. Again, huge setup cost (e.g. I had to implement alt-tab behaviour myself), but things ran smoothly since.
That’s fair. My experience with Ubuntu is that it’s basically fine for what I need a distro to do. I’d like to stay on this train because at the end of the day I just need my computer to work reliably. Ubuntu is not perfect, but it’s the devil I know. :)
For me, snaps auto-update without my input, and apt will install snaps without telling you they're snaps. So my assumption that my computer only updates when I tell it to no longer holds.
>What I don’t get is why people feel like they need to leave Ubuntu because of it
Because how would you otherwise end up with 999 different Linux distros? I bet someone already working on the Ubuntu-sans-snap distro (if not already exist)
It's called Linux Mint.
Another good reason to ditch a distro once honest, well done, but things change, now just a distro that push commercial crap. It's not a bold statement, snap, flatpack, appimage exists ONLY for commercial purposes.
The FLOSS world works with
- devs :: who write and publish code without the need to support any specific distro, packaging etc, many also package for their own favorite distro but that's a mere choice, many others just manually build their own code to have is hyper-fresh;
- packagers :: who package "upstream" code, some are distro core developers who package system things, others more or less casual packagers who package various software they use/need/like. They all provide patches as needed, ideas, well done bugreports to devs, they are not "a burden" but the core of the model, the ones who provide quality testing and reporting to devs, something no end-users do without a tremendous background noise, something no commercial software devs can get, the key to hi quality of FLOSS;
- generic users :: who profit from a complete distro, the one that fist their need most, offering casual bugreports, ideas, background noise as any casual user do, but filtered by distro community itself and distro packager the best kind of "data lake" that matched to packages form the best kind of automated expert system;
"modern" app-only packages serve a sole purpose: cut the packagers, cut off the distro variety pushing distros to mere cargo ship of apps, well separating "code producer" to "customers", something harmful for FLOSS but vital for commerce, the sole way a proprietary software house to stay afloat without the need to give code to a community, without the need of a community that help, of course, but also demand and pretend useful features and not anti-users lock-in.
IMVHO FSF should write a formal statements: supporting those limited and limiting (they can't work at system level) package systems means supporting commercial crap against FLOSS so distro who choose them must be considered Troy Horses in the FLOSS land. Unfortunately FSF receive too many funds by some interested party so I doubt that happen and that's another good reason to discuss the actual FLOSS sorry state reviving classic models from usenet to email-based development, modernized in UI/frontends terms for young devs, with modern video-tutorials etc, but pushed as much as possible to teach people the FLOSS model not the commercial model in disguise.
That's a lot of text without giving any motivation for your main point. What makes an app package created by the app developer more "commercial" and anti-FOSS than an app package created by a distro-specific packager? What's the difference between an RPM package and a Flatpak package? Proprietary software and FOSS software both get distributed in both kinds of packages.
In short: what are you talking about?
> What makes an app package created by the app developer more "commercial" and anti-FOSS than an app package created by a distro-specific packager?
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.
For me the best way to run Firefox on Debian based system is to download the compiled tar and extract it somewhere in my home dir. This way I get update through Firefox itself (like on Windows/MacOS).
If you are downloading the tarball from Mozilla, then you are affected by this telemetry:
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-...
I don't think that's the case; the telemetry is part of the installer, not the installed binary (that the tarball would contain)
The article says the download id is transmitted to Mozilla on first run, so it must be part of the installed binary?
However, the article does say the Mozilla FTP site doesn't have the download id.
Yeah it can. The only problem is my home directory is not on SSD and it takes long time to load Firefox from regular HDD.
I believe the 'proper' place to install it would be /opt. You can then give yourself edit permissions for the firefox directory so that firefox is capable of upgrading itself when you run it.
Yep- this. And put a symlink to it. Then you can quickly switch versions to nightly or whatever you need.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is an option on aarch64 Linux.
I'll be the first one to moan that browsers have become way too complex beasts. What's left of the idea that a browser is a (moderately complex) commodity item to view docs on the web bundled with your O/S of choice? Now we must update our browsers more frequently than the fscking web pages.
I understand why they do it - as browsers have become kitchen sinks, their API surface has become enormous. But at the same time, the stuff you actually want to read on the web is really getting few and far between, making constant x GiB browser updates uneconomical from an information theory standpoint, so to speak. Especially with FF updates in the habit to require restarts (why?) at the worst possible points in time for me.
The people you should be blaming are the ones who decide the web standards. The browsers are bloated and updated frequently because the web standards are bloated and updated frequently. That also killed off many alternative implementations. I'm sure that the requirements of the web platforms can be met without so many APIs and formats. They ruined a completely functional platform.
Gross. Snap can be handy but I've had so many problems with it. I don't like it becoming the defacto. Ubuntu has been good to me for a while, but more and more it seems like I gotta go find my new home. Maybe in the woods... where I build my own linux inside a pachinko machine and it calculates the time of year when I need to start preparing for the long cold winter. My partner and my children are loving and we work pretty hard and we do our best to maintain Pachintix, but sometimes forget the old standby's need of a dusting and some oil on the worm gears.
One year it meant we didn't save enough grain and our goats had an out of season extra birth, it got so cold so quick that the mothers died and we were only able to save one baby. The stew we ate through that sad, hard, cold winter was bitter... emotionally... and because the baby goats were so lean.
Something that kept us going was Pachintix being able to very slowly render old Sierra games to a tube oscilloscope that was for timing engines in the 50s that I adapted to render the terminal. We would all be so thrilled when we could enter our just barely two commands every day so Buck Rodgers could escape that alien night club and tell some jokes about Star Trek. To fill the time at night, I would regale my children with tales of the old shows. How one time Data started dreaming and cut Troi up like a cake but it turned out it was all fine and I forgot why. To think, all this difficult bliss was started by just how much it sucked to use Snap.
Biggest grip with Snaps is the longer start times. Otherwise I personally enjoy the auto updating of my applications.
One more reason to add to list "Why I recommend Debian over Ubuntu by now" (https://blog.hartwork.org/posts/why-i-recommend-debian-over-...).
Very bad, snap is crap.
So it's time to learn to compile Firefox from source, got it
Snap/flatpack is one of the best things to happen to Linux desktop. I no longer have to worry about messed up installs and missing dependencies.
Either snap or flatpack is the best thing. Both are just a waste of time and space.
I love flatpak. I consider snap to be just bloatware I have to wipe of my system on installation.
Hopefully soon I'll move off Ubuntu to greener pastures. Fedora Silverlight seems particularly intriguing.
As long as LibreWolf isn't snap-only... so we should contribute to their effort by funding them, if we want them to last.
"Pay your maintainers" should become the norm to all users of FLOSS. We must lobby our bosses to make regular donations to maintainers of the FOSS software used by the company. That's a purely rational business decision, not an ideological one.
The problem isn't Mozilla/Firefox in this case. It is Canonical/Ubuntu.
Firefox on most other distro (debian based or otherwise) can be installed with the proper system package manager.
Additionally Mozilla offers a flatpak version of Firefox which I strongly prefer over snap.
It's just Canonical's disdain to anything not homegrown that's behind this move.
I have not tried 22.04 yet, but it sounds like Ubuntuzilla may win some new users in the near future.
Euch, so what happens in Mint/Ubuntu which has so-far avoided this snap nastiness?
Nothing will change for Mint.
They are committed to continue distributing Firefox as a .deb package, following upstream as closely as possible.
Some of the best projects come from Ubuntu employees... after they quit from the toxic culture and can finally think for themselves.