[u10242]

And Firefox is a snap package now; the .deb will go away next release.

Canonical finally managed to make me switch back to Debian.

[drcongo]

As someone whose only experience with linux is servers and Raspberry Pi, can you tell me what's wrong with snaps? I've only used them on a self-hosted NextCloud and my experience with them has been decent, but I see a lot of dislike for them on HN.

[chomp]

There's pros and cons. It helps developers because they aren't restricted to the distro's shipped library versions, they can build against what they need. It also confines the app to a sandbox. The downsides are that the packages end up larger because they ship with all of the necessary bundled libraries (which can also increase memory usage of the application because it can't share the libraries loaded in RAM by the native operating system), and there's a lack of trust that the developer can keep up with bundled library security updates.

[makeworld]

Background daemon that takes up CPU, proprietary store, slow startup, and automatic updates in the background. Flatpak is much better if you need some sort of sandboxing, or updates outside what your distro can provide.

[sliken]

My complaints (not looked real recently though):

Snaps are Ubuntu specific and the server side/repo is closed source.

Snaps pollute the df/mount points with per snap lines.

They rolled out in a LTS release with minimal testing. Caused quite a few problems like not being able to boot as multiple snaps drained /dev/random (instead of /dev/urandom) and waited on more entropy, which was god awful slow since the boot hadn't finished.

There was no automatic cleanup of older snaps.

Generally it just seemed like a silly proprietary setup that Canocial tried to claim had wide industry support, despite not having that support. I'm not against the ideas, but why not docker? Flatpak? AppImages?

[empiricus]

I had some issues with one app not reading its config file, and wanted to strace it to see if it finds the config or not. Big surprise, cannot strace snap apps..

[evrflx]

Is there an alternative source for non-snap Firefox? snapd is the first thing I nuke on fresh installs. I would like to stay with Ubuntu, if possible.

[monsieurgaufre]

In the release notes (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/impish-indri-release-notes/21...):

The deb package remains available in the archive and will continue receiving updates for the lifetime of Ubuntu 21.10.

[shaicoleman]

You can also use the Flatpak version:

https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox

[blacksmith_tb]

I uninstalled the snap, then did apt install firefox, worked fine. In principle I am all in favor of more sandboxing for my browser, but when I opened FF on the machine I'd upgraded to Impish, it didn't import anything, open tabs, bookmarks, nada. Not what I'd call friendly onboarding...

[ahartmetz]

Possibly getting Firefox from Debian Sid (unstable). Will require some advanced apt configuration to make sure that nothing else accidentally comes from sid, and might break or require further apt configuration changes if it starts requiring library versions that aren't in Ubuntu.

I use Ubuntu and I sometimes install Debian Sid packages by downloading them in a browser and installing them with dpkg.

[jraph]

Mozilla's own tarballs.

[heroxbd]

You can migrate to Debian if possible. Ubuntu was a derivative from it.

[heroxbd]

You can try Debian, from which Ubuntu was derived. No snap.

[Barrin92]

you can always just download it from the website, unpack it and make a .desktop file or put a symlink under ~/bin or whatever

[jgb1984]

As a 20+ years Debian user I've never seen the added value of Ubuntu. Why use a derivative if you can get the real thing?

[CarelessExpert]

First and foremost, package recency.

If you run stable, which is released as snapshots ala Ubuntu, the packages are ancient.

If you run testing, which is a rolling distro ala Arch, they're a lot newer and pretty solid, but security updates lag.

If you run unstable, which is also rolling, things can (rarely) break.

Additionally, Ubuntu has decided to incorporate non-free software and drivers right into the base product, which gives a better out-of-the-box experience. In Debian this is all opt-in and requires a bit more effort.

Now, I run Debian testing on my laptop, and I'm a huge fan of the distribution, not the least because Debian is the bedrock on which at least a half a dozen other distros are built. But I can acknowledge that their more conservative approach to packaging does have its downsides.

[BiteCode_dev]

It works out of the box for most hardware, install proprietary things easily, including drivers and codecs, and have more up to date softwares. It also have lots of usability tweaks.

You can, have all that with debian, but then you have to do the work.

I don't want to do the work if canonical can do it for me.

[MikeKusold]

Ubuntu has a 10 year LTS support cycle and Debian has only 5 years.

While I often rebuild my servers much more frequently than that, it is nice to know that I could neglect things for a decade.

[xet7]

For Docker base image I use:

- If I use Debian, security scan at Quay.io shows included packages have vulnerabilities

- If I use Ubuntu, security scan at Quay.io shows included packages do not have vulnerabilities

[BiteCode_dev]

In their mind it makes sense: firefox is a user facing app that is frequently updated and requires a lot of dependencies. Perfect candidate for a snap.

But yeah, up to now, snaps really sucked, and flatpak is winning.

[3np]

Welcome back! I think it was 20.04 that really did it for me.

That being said, in general 21.10 looks like a good incremental update.

[andrewshadura]

I've just completed apt upgrade -t testing on my pre-release impish. Good to be back again.

[zmk5]

I don't notice a difference since upgrading from the deb to the snap.

[ur-whale]

> And Firefox is a snap package now

Oh, ouch!

[tored]

Oh, snap!