Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

Another good reason to ditch a distro once honest, well done, but things change, now just a distro that push commercial crap. It's not a bold statement, snap, flatpack, appimage exists ONLY for commercial purposes.

The FLOSS world works with

- devs :: who write and publish code without the need to support any specific distro, packaging etc, many also package for their own favorite distro but that's a mere choice, many others just manually build their own code to have is hyper-fresh;

- packagers :: who package "upstream" code, some are distro core developers who package system things, others more or less casual packagers who package various software they use/need/like. They all provide patches as needed, ideas, well done bugreports to devs, they are not "a burden" but the core of the model, the ones who provide quality testing and reporting to devs, something no end-users do without a tremendous background noise, something no commercial software devs can get, the key to hi quality of FLOSS;

- generic users :: who profit from a complete distro, the one that fist their need most, offering casual bugreports, ideas, background noise as any casual user do, but filtered by distro community itself and distro packager the best kind of "data lake" that matched to packages form the best kind of automated expert system;

"modern" app-only packages serve a sole purpose: cut the packagers, cut off the distro variety pushing distros to mere cargo ship of apps, well separating "code producer" to "customers", something harmful for FLOSS but vital for commerce, the sole way a proprietary software house to stay afloat without the need to give code to a community, without the need of a community that help, of course, but also demand and pretend useful features and not anti-users lock-in.

IMVHO FSF should write a formal statements: supporting those limited and limiting (they can't work at system level) package systems means supporting commercial crap against FLOSS so distro who choose them must be considered Troy Horses in the FLOSS land. Unfortunately FSF receive too many funds by some interested party so I doubt that happen and that's another good reason to discuss the actual FLOSS sorry state reviving classic models from usenet to email-based development, modernized in UI/frontends terms for young devs, with modern video-tutorials etc, but pushed as much as possible to teach people the FLOSS model not the commercial model in disguise.

> 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.

AUR is explicitly a community-driven effort. The others are packing standards, some of which (like DEB and RPM) are also used in community-driven efforts. Debian and RedHat derivatives have repositories that use DEB and RPM, respectively. There's not a lot of bike-shedding, here. Availability of functional software is a pretty big feature of Linux distributions.

And there is a big difference between those community efforts and the likes of Snap, AppImage, and FlatPack, which are developer-centric. User preferences on software distribution aren't always or even usually based on irrelvent arguments, but fundamental ones. The community efforts centralize dealing with compatibility and, to an extent, security with community standards, while the developer-centric model largely leaves this work to software developers alone. This is a meaningful distinction.

I don't know what kind of hoops Snap require to access files. Flatpak, however, has a pretty simple system for a fully sandboxed app to open a file or a directory: it just opens a file or directory picker, you pick a file or directory, and the app gets access to that file or directory without getting access to anything outside what you picked. Behind the scenes this is done via the XDG Portal system, but that's irrelevant to the end user who only sees a normal file open dialog.

Then for apps that have dotfile-type directories where you can put config files and other stuff, those simply exist in app-specific directories under .var in your home directory, so they're not difficult to find either.

VSCode was the one that made me uninstall snapd on the installation image for our classroom...

This is really overcomplicating it. Most mainstream end user Linux programs - including Firefox [0] - are distributed through archives you just unpack and run the binary inside, same as most Windows freeware. AppImages are just self-extracting versions of this. Most of the other formats you mention are for distro package managers - these aren't distribution formats and it's not the responsibility of the program authors to package for every distro, nor is it required for a package to be in repositories for people to run it.

Just ship an ELF binary in an archive. Include any files and libraries you need. Compile against the oldest glibc found in any system you care about supporting. That's all you need.

[0] https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/relea...