Live data from Hacker News

Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

old.reddit.com

21–30 of 152 posts

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#21

I don’t think I’ll ever use ubuntu again. The continued forcing of snap is killing it for me.

Same here. Strongly eyeing NixOS and patiently awaiting real work experience from a co-worker who already did the plunge.

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#22

I don’t think I’ll ever use ubuntu again. The continued forcing of snap is killing it for me.

Same here. Strongly eyeing NixOS and patiently awaiting real work experience from a co-worker who already did the plunge.

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

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#23
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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#24

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%.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#25

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

Personally recommend openSuse Leap as a boring distro, if you want a bit less boring Tumbleweed is great.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#26

I don’t think I’ll ever use ubuntu again. The continued forcing of snap is killing it for me.

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#27

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?

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#28

I don’t think I’ll ever use ubuntu again. The continued forcing of snap is killing it for me.

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

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#29

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

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.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#30
post #9

... 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.

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.
Post reply on HN