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.
Yeah it’s not really a secret
I got a notification about it when I upgraded from 20.04 LTS that they will only serve it as a snap package.
Definitely not you, they absolutely do this with snaps and have for a while. This was the main reason I stopped using Ubuntu.
Not a secret, but annoying as hell. I usually replace it with a Flatpak and uninstall Snap.
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.
Disadvantage: you’re now using a browser from the biggest
spyad-ware company and killed web heterogeneity.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.
Try sunglasses? But maybe other souls can still be saved from evil…
They delivered their promise: they were at least not evil, at first.
This is why i switched to Debian. It’s 99% of Ubuntu, without the crap.
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.
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.
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?
Mostly the same, and if not all it has taken for me to figure it out was searching “fedora $pkgname”
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.
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).
Docker in a snap is too meta for me.
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
I’ve had it happen too. In fact it is what prompted me to move away from Kubuntu.
I suggest Mint or straight Debian. I prefer Mint for anything graphical, Debian for headless
What benifit does Mint have over Debian for anything graphical?
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.
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.
Yeah, there’s an entire page bitching about it on Linux Mint’s website.
Welcome to 2020, where Debian is once again your trusted distro.
You could compile it from source yourself, and you won’t even have to worry about packaging and package managers.
They started doing that in a couple of years back. Saw quite a bit of backlash in the Linux news media at the time.
I’m aware that when the user runs(without adding Mozilla’s apt repository),
sudo apt install firefoxthe 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, this is known. They do the same for Chromium. If you want a browser from ubuntu, it’s going to be a snap.
w3mis a proper deb 😛Looks like only firefox, chromium-browser and thunderbird are these dummy transitional packages. There’s a
fwupd-snap, but the defaultfwupdis a full deb.
Not defending Ubuntu but wasn’t this clarified to be Mozilla’s deploying it via Snap and requesting to remove the apt installation?
Source: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-deb-apt-ubuntu-22-04
It was a collaboration, although I’m having trouble finding a source for who wanted it first.
It is one of the reasons many people turn away from Ubuntu.
Not secretly, no.
Exactly. Enough with the inane conspiracism.
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.
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: 1000Package: firefox*
Pin: release o=Ubuntu
Pin-Priority: -1’ | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillaTrue, 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.
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.
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 firefoxBut I never heard that the installed DEB version of Firefox is replaced by Snap version of Firefox.
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
aptis configured to take into account Snap packages.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 firefoxand basically nothing else.
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.
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.
At least a few years. I switched to Linux a year ago and that was a huge consideration for me when choosing Debian over Ubuntu.
