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

[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.

[beeng@discuss.tchncs.de]

I would like to stay with apt as package manager so the package names stay the same to what I know, or is yum/dnf/etc gonna use the same for most?

[ritchie@lemmy.world]

I have a laptop that needs a proprietary wifi driver. I just "love" it when the debian net installer works out of the box, but after first boot wifi dies because the driver is missing in the installed instance I need to find a lan cable, do some athletics to get to the router, then install the driver and only then I can connect via wifi

[daggermoon@lemmy.world]

Is KDE Neon still broken? For awhile it was the only Ubuntu based distro I'd recommend. Yes, I know about Mint but no HDR or Wayland.

[morphit@feddit.uk]

Yeah, I just liked that bit of the meme. In the prank the meme is based on, they really are the same.

[morphit@feddit.uk]

Yeah, I really dislike snap and have puppet clean it out and add in the real mozilla repo for me. If I wanted sandboxed apps I'd probably look at flatpak but I think there's still work to be done there also.

[neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Mostly the same, and if not all it has taken for me to figure it out was searching "fedora $pkgname"

[notabot@lemm.ee]

It just occured to me that if you want to use Ubuntu without snap, you could uninstall the snap package itself (I'm not on Ubuntu, so you might need to find it), then put a 'hold' on the package to prevent it being reinstalled. That should, in turn, prevent any package versions that use snap from being installed.

Initially uninstalling snap might require removing any packages that use it, but that'll tell you what you need non-snap versions of.

[foobarrington@lemmy.world]

Yup. They also did this with Docker, and it broke my setup (and was a bitch to debug).

This was a couple of years ago, and I haven't used Ubuntu unless absolutely necessary (and then usually in a container).

[quazatron@lemmy.world]

Not a secret, but annoying as hell. I usually replace it with a Flatpak and uninstall Snap.

[mangocats@feddit.it]

Agreed, not a secret, and not wanted. I uninstall Firefox and install Google Chrome from a .deb - disadvantage: you have to update it manually. Advantage: it doesn't update itself automatically.

[mangocats@feddit.it]

Docker in a snap is too meta for me.

[mangocats@feddit.it]

I'm reasonably happy with XFCE/Xubuntu - it's not as slick of a desktop as KDE or Gnome, and in some ways that's a great thing.

[antithetical@lemmy.deedium.nl]

Disadvantage: you're now using a browser from the biggest spy ad-ware company and killed web heterogeneity.

Try: Firefox from Mozilla-Team PPA

[mangocats@feddit.it]

Too late, they own my soul already. I have successfully resisted Meta, X, Microsoft, and any number of lesser daemons, but the one true G has shown me their light and I am unable to look away.

[isokiero@sopuli.xyz]

True, but more often than not mozilla should have newer packages on their repository than any distribution. And the main problem still is that Ubuntu changed apt and threw snap in to the mix where it doesn't belong.

[antithetical@lemmy.deedium.nl]

Try sunglasses? But maybe other sould can still be saved from evil..

[bluescreenofdeath@lemmy.world]

I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said?

I'm saying that just adding Mozilla's PPA to your sources won't change apt's behavior when installing Firefox unless you tell apt to prefer the package offered by the Mozilla PPA.

As someone who uses Kubuntu as a daily driver, I'm well aware of the snap drama and have worked around it using the method I pasted above.

Even though it's an underhanded move by Cannonical, I'm still glad the OS is open source since it makes the workaround so trivial.

[mangocats@feddit.it]

They delivered their promise: they were at least not evil, at first.

[brianary@startrek.website]

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/google-removes-pledge-to-not-use-ai-for-weapons-from-website/