Is it me or Ubuntu secretly replaces DEB Firefox with Snap Firefox?

[morphit@feddit.uk]

Well, yes, except Canonical have made them actually do the same thing in the case of Firefox. I'm not aware of any other packages that have the deb install just run the snap install.

[secret300@lemmy.sdf.org]

Yeah it's not really a secret

[aliteralcabbage@feddit.uk]

I used it decades ago (using the CLI installer for a Sid install I eventually fucked up beyond repair) and it was okay for a slightly tech savvy teenager, even then.

I suspect a lot of these issues are down to hardware compatibility more than anything else.

[captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works]

Yeah, there's an entire page bitching about it on Linux Mint's website.

[irritableocelot@beehaw.org]

Yeah for sure, I read your comment as excusing canonical screwing with user intent but I see that's not what you meant.

[captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works]

Red Hat and Ubuntu.

[mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Chromium too iirc

[ggppjj@lemmy.world]

It was a collaboration, although I'm having trouble finding a source for who wanted it first.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/feature-freeze-exception-seeding-the-official-firefox-snap-in-ubuntu-desktop/24210

[fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com]

This is why i switched to Debian. It's 99% of Ubuntu, without the crap.

[morphit@feddit.uk]

Yup, apt install chromium-browser calls snap install chromium. Looks like thunderbird is the same. There's a fwupd-snap deb but fwupd seems to be the default.

[hedgehog@ttrpg.network]

Clearly they’re cosplaying as a Canonical engineer whose internal explanation and pleas for them to not take this approach fell upon deaf ears /j

[beeng@discuss.tchncs.de]

I.... I.... I don't know why I haven't done that myself. (Am now on NixOS btw) but for work maybe I ask for Debian cloud box.

[morphit@feddit.uk]

w3m is a proper deb

Looks like only firefox, chromium-browser and thunderbird are these dummy transitional packages. There's a fwupd-snap, but the default fwupd is a full deb.

[morphit@feddit.uk]

Canonical added an epoch prefix to the firefox version number. Because that epoch (1) is higher than the implicit default (0), the official ubuntu dummy package is always considered to be a higher version than the official Mozilla package. apt doesn't look at snap packages, it installs the deb, but the ubuntu deb just runs snap install firefox and basically nothing else.

[baaahb@feddit.nl]

Yep, I am agreeing with you. The statement was never snap and deb are identical, its that canonical is making them do identical things.

[beeng@discuss.tchncs.de]

My work cannot manage permissions well so I cannot remove snap Firefox cos its in use by another user.

Meanwhile current snap version of Firefox is crashing on my profile

[phar@lemmy.ml]

And there are still other options!

[ritchie@lemmy.world]

I got a notification about it when I upgraded from 20.04 LTS that they will only serve it as a snap package.

[neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

For work, you could also try Fedora Workstation or Linux Mint Debian Edition. Debian is pretty barebones, but if that isnt a bother then do whatever.

[ritchie@lemmy.world]

I must have hit that 1% last time. I assembled a new PC, wanted to install debian and could not get a login screen after installation. At that point I wanted something that just works. I installed Xubuntu and had the machine ready right away.