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Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

theregister.com

11–20 of 105 posts

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#11
I've been using Firefox Nightly as my primary web browser at work for many years and have never encountered a problem except it annoys me with updating too often. I can see no difference from regular Firefox except Nightly supports more things.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#12
post #6

Tangentially related, Firefox-from-snap completely broke for me recently in a way that I couldn't be bothered to diagnose ("error: cannot communicate with server: Post http://localhost/v2/snaps/firefox : dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory"). It prompted me to finally wipe Snap fully from my system and install Firefox from the Mozilla PPA. The only other Snap app I currently use is Intelli…

I have never had a snap package I've installed that I didn't have to immediately uninstall and find the .deb for because the snap ran into a bunch of weird issues. I hate snap I hate whoever thought it was a good idea and I hope they constantly have bump in their sock that they are unable to fix that does not relieve until the day they get rid of snaps.

Some people, when confronted with systems problems, think "I know, I'll make another system in a container". Now they have twice as many problems.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#13
Brave has been taking the same approach for a while now (they package their own .deb, and run their own APT repo),

https://brave.com/linux/

Why doesn't Firefox also package their stable/release version this way? It's just nightly on this Mozilla repo, and extended-support (ESR) on the Debian-administered side.

edit: Oh, the article answers this:

- "Following a period of testing, these packages will become available on the beta, esr, and release branches of Firefox."

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#14

Tangentially related, Firefox-from-snap completely broke for me recently in a way that I couldn't be bothered to diagnose ("error: cannot communicate with server: Post http://localhost/v2/snaps/firefox : dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory"). It prompted me to finally wipe Snap fully from my system and install Firefox from the Mozilla PPA. The only other Snap app I currently use is Intelli…

## app-conf/apt/nosnap.pref # To prevent repository packages from triggering the installation of snap, # this file forbids snapd from being installed by APT. Package: snapd Pin: release a=* Pin-Priority: -10 ### Remove snapd applications and service snap remove --purge firefox snap remove --purge gnome-3-38-2004 snap remove --purge gtk-common-themes snap remove --purge bare snap remove --purge core20 snap remove --pu…

The hero we need, thank you!

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#15

Tangentially related, Firefox-from-snap completely broke for me recently in a way that I couldn't be bothered to diagnose ("error: cannot communicate with server: Post http://localhost/v2/snaps/firefox : dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory"). It prompted me to finally wipe Snap fully from my system and install Firefox from the Mozilla PPA. The only other Snap app I currently use is Intelli…

Does the mozilla ppa provide the www-browser metapackage?

If not, you might run into [this bug](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/uj58i5/psa_fix...)

FWIW my solution was using equivs to create a dummy package to satisfy www-browser and installing that.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#16

Ahh... my two favorite tech-related subject matters: Linux distros and the politics of browser choice. I'm currently trying to invert this entire discussion by putting a well-oiled Linux distro inside of the browser [1]. [1] For whoever doubts that a proper Linux distro can be created through pure Javascript running in a browser, you obviously haven't tried out https://linuxontheweb.github.io/ yet!

How does it work?

What shell it is using? It doesn't seem POSIXy (eg I can't `echo $$` to see the shell pid), and the filesystem is pretty bare

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#17

Tangentially related, Firefox-from-snap completely broke for me recently in a way that I couldn't be bothered to diagnose ("error: cannot communicate with server: Post http://localhost/v2/snaps/firefox : dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory"). It prompted me to finally wipe Snap fully from my system and install Firefox from the Mozilla PPA. The only other Snap app I currently use is Intelli…

Too bad the ppa doesn't seem to work on Debian proper. Yesterday I configured a new laptop with Debian Bookworm but I don't want Firefox ESR, I want the latest stable. Snap sucks, the Flatpak version has some limitations that the real version doesn't, I don't want to run a mixed stable/sid distro and the only 3rd party repository I found was hosted on sourceforge, which I just plain don't trust. So it's 2023 and I'm still stuck manually downloading and unpacking .tar.bz2 files into /opt every other week.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#19

Tangentially related, Firefox-from-snap completely broke for me recently in a way that I couldn't be bothered to diagnose ("error: cannot communicate with server: Post http://localhost/v2/snaps/firefox : dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory"). It prompted me to finally wipe Snap fully from my system and install Firefox from the Mozilla PPA. The only other Snap app I currently use is Intelli…

Too bad the ppa doesn't seem to work on Debian proper. Yesterday I configured a new laptop with Debian Bookworm but I don't want Firefox ESR, I want the latest stable. Snap sucks, the Flatpak version has some limitations that the real version doesn't, I don't want to run a mixed stable/sid distro and the only 3rd party repository I found was hosted on sourceforge, which I just plain don't trust. So it's 2023 and I'm…

> So it's 2023 and I'm still stuck manually downloading and unpacking .tar.bz2 files into /opt every other week.

You should have to do that only once, then Firefox updates itself just like on Windows or MacOS. I ran this setup (Debian stable + Firefox installed by unpacking a tar) for years and never had an issue. Maybe you should unpack it in a directory where your normal user can write files to let Firefox handle the update.

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