this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Not a secret, but annoying as hell. I usually replace it with a Flatpak and uninstall Snap.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Agreed, not a secret, and not wanted. I uninstall Firefox and install Google Chrome from a .deb - disadvantage: you have to update it manually. Advantage: it doesn't update itself automatically.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Disadvantage: you're now using a browser from the biggest ~~spy~~ ad-ware company and killed web heterogeneity.

Try: Firefox from Mozilla-Team PPA

[–] [email protected] 0 points 55 minutes ago (1 children)

Too late, they own my soul already. I have successfully resisted Meta, X, Microsoft, and any number of lesser daemons, but the one true G has shown me their light and I am unable to look away.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 52 minutes ago* (last edited 39 minutes ago)

Try sunglasses? But maybe other souls can still be saved from evil..

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Docker in a snap is too meta for me.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah it's not really a secret

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

This is why i switched to Debian. It's 99% of Ubuntu, without the crap.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Mostly the same, and if not all it has taken for me to figure it out was searching "fedora $pkgname"

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 hours ago (14 children)
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[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 hours ago

Solve the problem. Drop ubunutu

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

Yes. That was the last straw for me. I switched to debian stable, and haven't looked back since

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 12 hours ago (5 children)

They started doing that in a couple of years back. Saw quite a bit of backlash in the Linux news media at the time.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

Yeah, there's an entire page bitching about it on Linux Mint's website.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 hours ago

It is one of the reasons many people turn away from Ubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 hours ago (16 children)

At this point, why is anyone using Ubuntu for desktop? You have soooo many options

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 hours ago (8 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

I suspect that what's happened is you installed the apt version, then at some point upgraded it and there was a version in the main repo that had a higher version number and installed the snap version. If two repositories both have a package with the same name, and no other rules in place, the higher version number wins.

If that is the case, you need to pin the firefox package to the mozilla repository. You can find more details here: https://wiki.debian.org/AptConfiguration

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