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Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

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Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#111

Post by sph »

rkv wrote: post #109
AussieWog93 wrote: post #32

There'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…

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 a…

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#112

Post by robto »

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#113

Post by sph »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #95
haunter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#114

Post by sph »

smackeyacky wrote: post #15
jeffparsons wrote: post #13

I've been hearing good things about modern Fedora as an alternative "boring" operating system. Maybe now is the time to make the switch.

More obvious choice for an Ubuntu user would be Debian or another direct debian derivative wouldn't it?

Pretty much all package managers work the same. Learning dnf when you know apt isn't that big of a deal.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#115

Post by suyjuris »

jckahn wrote: post #78

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#116

Post by sph »

approxim8ion wrote: post #16
jeffparsons wrote: post #13

I've been hearing good things about modern Fedora as an alternative "boring" operating system. Maybe now is the time to make the switch.

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#118

Post by sreevisakh »

account42 wrote: post #103
everybodyknows wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#120

Post by adhesive_wombat »

sph wrote: post #113
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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