Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 152 posts

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#31

Post by cies »

greatgib wrote: post #27
smackeyacky wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

Do they take a stance against snap?

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#32

Post by AussieWog93 »

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/Mac system, no issues.

On Linux, an OS with 3% market share, there are more competing standards to count: Deb, RPM, snap, FlatPak, AUR, AppImage and probably a dozen other semi-popular ones. Every individual user has their opinion (and they'll voice it!) as to which standard is the best. At best, this leads to God knows how many man-hours of duplicated work packaging and QAing. At worst, it leads to the dev abandoning the thought of Linux altogether.

Linux on Desktop simply can't move forward by continued bike-shedding over frankly irrelevant details. Even if the only rationale for a standard is "Because Mike Shuttleworth said so, and he got a phone call from Mandela in space", that's a massive improvement over the current status quo.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#33

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#34

Post by NextHendrix »

cies wrote: post #29
stockerta wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've also had this experience with the Fedora partition configurator. FWIW, you can somewhat get around it by manually creating the partition layout you want (LUKS+LVM+RAID etc), then mounting it as you'd want to use it, then just selecting it from within the partition manager.

This is also the only way I've found to do it with Ubuntu's installer, but once it's set up it works fine.

Re: Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

#37

Post by robert_foss »

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…

Snap is not a standard, and never will be (RedHat will always ship flatpak for example). So Snap is no universal solution.

At the same time snap packages have serious downsides for end users.

Post reply on HN