After creating a fresh installation of Ubuntu 24.04, I installed DEB Firefox from APT by following Mozilla’s instructions from here. But I noticed that it was secretly replaced with Snap Firefox. I was able to verify this by checking the About Firefox page. This is the third time I noticed this.

  • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
    8·
    4 小时前

    Yup. They also did this with Docker, and it broke my setup (and was a bitch to debug).

    This was a couple of years ago, and I haven’t used Ubuntu unless absolutely necessary (and then usually in a container).

    • ritchie@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 小时前

      I got a notification about it when I upgraded from 20.04 LTS that they will only serve it as a snap package.

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    3·
    6 小时前

    Is KDE Neon still broken? For awhile it was the only Ubuntu based distro I’d recommend. Yes, I know about Mint but no HDR or Wayland.

    • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
      2·
      3 小时前

      I’m reasonably happy with XFCE/Xubuntu - it’s not as slick of a desktop as KDE or Gnome, and in some ways that’s a great thing.

    • ritchie@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 小时前

      I must have hit that 1% last time. I assembled a new PC, wanted to install debian and could not get a login screen after installation. At that point I wanted something that just works. I installed Xubuntu and had the machine ready right away.

    • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      7 小时前

      I… I… I don’t know why I haven’t done that myself. (Am now on NixOS btw) but for work maybe I ask for Debian cloud box.

      • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        6 小时前

        For work, you could also try Fedora Workstation or Linux Mint Debian Edition. Debian is pretty barebones, but if that isnt a bother then do whatever.

        • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          6 小时前

          I like gnome, but i guess i could look at fedora.

          I would like to stay with apt as package manager so the package names stay the same to what I know, or is yum/dnf/etc gonna use the same for most?

  • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
    5·
    7 小时前

    My work cannot manage permissions well so I cannot remove snap Firefox cos its in use by another user.

    Meanwhile current snap version of Firefox is crashing on my profile

  • zod000@lemmy.ml
    20·
    10 小时前

    Definitely not you, they absolutely do this with snaps and have for a while. This was the main reason I stopped using Ubuntu.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      15·
      10 小时前

      From a security standpoint? Not even close. From a software-release validation requirement, not even in the same galaxy. If they look the same, it’s only due to Clarke’s law.

      • Baaahb@feddit.nlEnglish
        8·
        9 小时前

        You are missing the attribution. The person you are replying to is making a joke that Canonical says they are the same, not that they are actually the same.

        • hedgehog@ttrpg.network
          3·
          7 小时前

          Clearly they’re cosplaying as a Canonical engineer whose internal explanation and pleas for them to not take this approach fell upon deaf ears /j

        • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
          14·
          9 小时前

          That is not the same thing as “snap and apt Firefox are the same”. They just hijacked apt to force snap in.

          • Morphit @feddit.uk
            8·
            9 小时前

            So both commands do the same thing… right? I’m not saying snap and apt are the same in general.

            • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
              3·
              8 小时前

              Yeah for sure, I read your comment as excusing canonical screwing with user intent but I see that’s not what you meant.

              • Morphit @feddit.uk
                1·
                5 小时前

                Yeah, I really dislike snap and have puppet clean it out and add in the real mozilla repo for me. If I wanted sandboxed apps I’d probably look at flatpak but I think there’s still work to be done there also.

          • Baaahb@feddit.nlEnglish
            4·
            9 小时前

            You are missing the attribution. The person you are replying to is making a joke that Canonical says they are the same, not that they are actually the same.

            • Morphit @feddit.uk
              1·
              9 小时前

              Well, yes, except Canonical have made them actually do the same thing in the case of Firefox. I’m not aware of any other packages that have the deb install just run the snap install.

              • Baaahb@feddit.nlEnglish
                2·
                7 小时前

                Yep, I am agreeing with you. The statement was never snap and deb are identical, its that canonical is making them do identical things.

                • Morphit @feddit.uk
                  1·
                  6 小时前

                  Yeah, I just liked that bit of the meme. In the prank the meme is based on, they really are the same.

                • Morphit @feddit.uk
                  1·
                  8 小时前

                  Yup, apt install chromium-browser calls snap install chromium. Looks like thunderbird is the same. There’s a fwupd-snap deb but fwupd seems to be the default.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      17·
      13 小时前

      But it’s not obvious either. When I say ‘apt install firefox’, specially after adding their repository to sources.list, I’d expect to get a .deb from mozilla. Silently overriding my commands rubs me in a very wrong way.

      • BluescreenOfDeath@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        11 小时前

        It takes a little more than just adding a different repository to your package manager, you have to tell apt which to prefer:

        echo ’
        Package: *
        Pin: origin packages.mozilla.org
        Pin-Priority: 1000

        Package: firefox*
        Pin: release o=Ubuntu
        Pin-Priority: -1’ | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla

        • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          3 小时前

          True, but more often than not mozilla should have newer packages on their repository than any distribution. And the main problem still is that Ubuntu changed apt and threw snap in to the mix where it doesn’t belong.

          • BluescreenOfDeath@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 小时前

            I’m not disagreeing with anything you’ve said?

            I’m saying that just adding Mozilla’s PPA to your sources won’t change apt’s behavior when installing Firefox unless you tell apt to prefer the package offered by the Mozilla PPA.

            As someone who uses Kubuntu as a daily driver, I’m well aware of the snap drama and have worked around it using the method I pasted above.

            Even though it’s an underhanded move by Cannonical, I’m still glad the OS is open source since it makes the workaround so trivial.

    • sourov@lemm.eeOP
      51·
      13 小时前

      Since when this became a known thing? I’m aware that the snap version is installed when the user is trying to install the deb version of Firefox by running,

      sudo apt install firefox

      But I never heard that the installed DEB version of Firefox is replaced by Snap version of Firefox.

      • Routhinator@startrek.websiteEnglish
        9·
        12 小时前

        The deb version is a pointer to the snap in their repos. Nothings being replaced, it no longer exists. The deb version of Firefox in Ubuntu repos is a wrapper that installs snap and has no binaries in it. Has been for 3 years or so.

        • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
          2·
          11 小时前

          It’s more than that. Ubuntu copies the Debian repos and then applies their own changes on top. Debian has a native (DEB) Firefox package, so Ubuntu specifically has to remove it for every new version.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        21·
        11 小时前

        Well then you haven’t been following it closely. As someone else said, the reason is simple: the Snap version is more recent (like it or not) and in Ubuntu apt is configured to take into account Snap packages.

        • Morphit @feddit.uk
          3·
          7 小时前

          Canonical added an epoch prefix to the firefox version number. Because that epoch (1) is higher than the implicit default (0), the official ubuntu dummy package is always considered to be a higher version than the official Mozilla package. apt doesn’t look at snap packages, it installs the deb, but the ubuntu deb just runs snap install firefox and basically nothing else.