Wasn’t that one of the main critiques of snap/ubuntu/canonical a few years ago already?
Among my personal dislike for its shade of purple, that has been my primary reason to not recommend ubuntu for a while, at least.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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It's a dilemma; most Windows and Mac users would benefit from that kind of locked-down, idiot-proof format. Even having the choice of multiple repos is too much for them. So while I personally hate it, that's what most people (i.e. non-Linux users) want and need.
I recommend Ubuntu as the beginner distro for everyone, but with the hope that they eventually drop the training wheels and switch to Debian.
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For awhile I was getting firefox crashes in Mint all the time. Turns out it was the snap version being unstable.
Why even enable snaps? It's like asking to have headaches.
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It's a known and documented issue that Ubuntu does. They secretly install the Snap version, even if you tried to install the Deb package. This is an issue since years: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1345385/how-can-i-stop-apt-from-installing-snap-packages (posted 3 years and 7 months ago)
My problem is not like that. I’m aware that when the user runs(without adding Mozilla’s apt repository),
sudo apt install firefox
the snap version of Firefox is installed. But I never heard that, though APT is configured to install Firefox from Mozilla’s repository, the DEB version will be uninstalled and the Snap version will be installed.
Yes, that's the exact issue. Ubuntu does that for years. You use apt to install deb, but Ubuntu installs silently the Snap version. The article I linked was talking about that almost 4 years ago and talks about how to stop that. It's an old issue not many are aware off.
Ubuntu uses Snap as first-class method to install software. So if a piece of software is available as DEB or Snap, Ubuntu will always use Snap.
Thanks. I hate snaps. I'll probably just stop using Ubuntu.
Why?
I’m aware that when the user runs(without adding Mozilla’s apt repository),
sudo apt install firefox
the snap version of Firefox is installed. But I never heard that, though APT is configured to install Firefox from Mozilla’s repository, the DEB version will be uninstalled and the Snap version will be installed.
The whole apt ecosystem is kind of a mess, if you ask me. Debian stable updates on archeological timescales, Debian testing just isn't a very good rolling release disto, you're better off with Arch or OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want to actually use a rolling release as a daily driver, Ubuntu is a mess of annoying corporate decisions I hate from Canonical, and all the others are all just kind of disjointed in how they try to fix those issues.
My personal favorite is Mint. They just try to make Ubuntu with some classic, boring desktop design and minus the more controversial Canonical decisions, but obviously that's not everyone's cup of tea. I dunno, there is no perfect distro, you just have to find the one that for you it takes the least amount of effort to fix. Ubuntu really just kind of makes it a pain in the butt to fix all their weirdness though.
Debian testing just isn’t a very good rolling release disto
What makes you say that?
It's not as up to date as other rolling releases, unlike stable it doesn't get security patches right away, it gets frozen for months during the switch from one stable to the next, and in my fairly limited experience it just has more bugs. It's not bad, but it's a testing branch. It's not intended as a daily driver, and it shows.
One of the reason I moved to MX Linux, it is Debian based, always latest everything, like 6.12.11 kernel, my FF just got updated to 135.0, and it is no systemd, no flatpak, no snap, everything is DEB, and stable.
You could compile it from source yourself, and you won't even have to worry about packaging and package managers.