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

Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 105 posts

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

#81

Post by stevekemp »

gottorf wrote: post #18

I use the "long-term support" version of any software whenever possible. On Debian, that's the firefox-esr package. I suppose I'm at the age where I no longer desire the bleeding edge.

I've run a Debian desktop system for the past decade (and more!) and for the past few years there's been a handful of packages I install from binaries/source locally.

Having an up to date browser matters to me more than almost every other package. So I install the binary beneath /opt/firefox, and update it myself whenever a new release comes out. (I even created a simple "firefox-wrapper" package to point to the binary, and provide firefox to avoid any dependency issues and avoid the need to install two versions).

Otherwise I think calibre, the arduino IDE, and the go toolchain, are the only binaries I've got deployed beneath /opt, as they have historically churned a lot too.

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

#82

Post by throw555chip »

crabbone wrote: post #74
mistrial9 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

## 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…

Writing from memory, so might be a bunch of b/s... still. I'm afraid this isn't enough and something like apt-get update can trigger full reinstall of Snap and a bunch of other junk installed with it.

I've used the pin apt to prevent snap reinstalling approach on multiple machines for years with no recurrence of snap.

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

#83

Post by throw555chip »

ploxiln wrote: post #23

I was running debian stable for the last few years (until a few days ago, due to a brand new laptop ...) and was perfectly happy with the Firefox linux build tarballs: 1. untar as root into /opt 2. symlink /opt/firefox/firefox to /usr/local/bin/firefox 3. compose a 13-line firefox.desktop and put in ~/.local/share/applications/ Only the first step needs to be repeated when there is a new release.

I downloaded the tar to my user account Downloads dir, unpack and run from there. Created a launcher in KDE. I use Help > About and it checks for updates, pulls any and updates and tells me to restart Firefox, works great. Wish Mozilla would put Firefox in Ubuntu repos like Thunderbird. Makes me wonder if Mozilla gets a kickback from Canonical to diss Ubuntu users and make them think snap is the only way to run Firefox.

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

#84

Post by ksherlock »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #55
r9295 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian regularly dispatches security patches in the form of updates for firefox/chromium. It's the same as running "apt upgrade"

Debian ships Firefox ESR, not Firefox stable. As a web developer I cannot work on just ESR.

The world would be a better place if web developers used old browsers on old computers with dial-up internet access.

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

#85

Post by xorcist »

ravenstine wrote: post #75
dyingkneepad wrote: post #27

I think web browsers should be the exception to Distro's "stable" release rules. Browsers do not work at all like every other package. There are so many security implications, everything is so complex that I really think having whatever is the newest release is actually the most stable strategy. New releases tend to be pretty stable considering how much testing they get everywhere.

Browsers prove that stable distros for the desktop are a failed approach. It's one thing for stable server distros because the goal there should be software that changes infrequently and only needs to be updated with security patches most of the time. For desktop Linux, a user can and should be able to install and run lots of complicated code frequently. A browser is running and doing all sorts of complicated and arb…

Debian testing strikes a good balance between integration tested and up to date software, and is a really good general purpose desktop.

The main downside is that security updates is on a best-effort basis. The security team's focus is on stable and unstable. Testing will get them, but sometimes a few days late. While I understand their priorities, I also wish that would change.

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

#86

Post by lproven »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #17
smallerfish wrote: post #4

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…

[Article author/submitter here]

If you follow the link in the story to the older story about Firefox ESR on Debian, it describes 2 different ways to install natively-packaged .DEB versions of Firefox $CURRENT on Debian.

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

#87

Post by lproven »

arun-mani-j wrote: post #30

Wow I really needed this! So far I have been using the tar file from the website. Very nice it comes with auto-updates but some dependency issues can be difficult to debug. So a repository by Mozilla which ships the browser and integrates neatly into apt is a big "Thank you" from me. :)

[Author/submitter here]

Glad it helped someone!

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

#88

Post by lproven »

lakomen wrote: post #40

The author is an untrustworthy Ubuntu astroturfer who picks fights and insults his critics on the platform he publishes the paid articles he writes.

The author -- me -- rejects every one of those accusations.

I am a former member of staff at both Red Hat and SUSE, and I have coming up on 30 years of experience on Linux across coming up on 100 different distros.

Among the OSes on bare metal on my home machines are macOS, FreeBSD, RISC OS, ArcaOS, FreeDOS, PC DOS, Haiku, Oberon/A2, ChromeOS Flex, Q4OS, Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10... alongside Ubuntu and other distros.

As for Ubuntu itself, as it happens, I thoroughly dislike GNOME and never recommend or use it.

Among Linux distros which have been my full-time desktop platform were SUSE and Caldera OpenLinux.

My laptops mostly run Ubuntu with the Unity desktop, with Snap packaging removed and disabled, but I am currently assessing a move to MX Linux.

I've been using UNIX systems since 1988 and I still don't like it much. Case sensitivity is a pain, the shell is pointlessly arcane, and I am not a programmer -- not because I can't, because I can but I recognize that I'm not very good at it -- and don't really want an OS designed for programmers.

My favourite OSes over a 41 years in computing so far were VAX/VMS, Acorn RISC OS, and Classic MacOS, although I was a keen user of IBM OS/2 2 for some years.

I am a paid full-time member of staff at The Register, where I have been for 2 years today, as it happens. Before that, I freelanced for them from 2009. Before that I wrote for the Inquirer.

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

#89

Post by fsflover »

xorcist wrote: post #85
ravenstine wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers prove that stable distros for the desktop are a failed approach. It's one thing for stable server distros because the goal there should be software that changes infrequently and only needs to be updated with security patches most of the time. For desktop Linux, a user can and should be able to install and run lots of complicated code frequently. A browser is running and doing all sorts of complicated and arb…

Debian testing strikes a good balance between integration tested and up to date software, and is a really good general purpose desktop. The main downside is that security updates is on a best-effort basis. The security team's focus is on stable and unstable. Testing will get them, but sometimes a few days late. While I understand their priorities, I also wish that would change.

I solved this problem by using Qubes OS. It doesn't matter if my browsing VM gets compromised, since there is ni data in it.

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

#90

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #55
r9295 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian regularly dispatches security patches in the form of updates for firefox/chromium. It's the same as running "apt upgrade"

Debian ships Firefox ESR, not Firefox stable. As a web developer I cannot work on just ESR.

As a web surfer FF-ESR is sufficient for my use cases. Besides that it's good 'Anti-FOMO'.
Post reply on HN