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.

  • Revan343@lemmy.ca
    9·
    8 hours ago

    I suggest Mint or straight Debian. I prefer Mint for anything graphical, Debian for headless

      • Revan343@lemmy.ca
        5·
        7 hours ago

        I’ve just found it’s more polished right out of the box. Definitely more new-user-friendly, like Ubuntu, but with Snap gutted out.

        I have been using the regular Mint (based on Ubuntu), but I’m probably going to use the Debian edition next time I install a new system

    • ritchie@lemmy.world
      4·
      15 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.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      28·
      18 hours ago

      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.

      • juipeltje@lemmy.world
        1·
        32 minutes ago

        It’s a joke based of the fact that when you type apt install firefox on ubuntu, it will install the snap instead of the deb package, which is what you would expect when you use apt to install something.

        • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
          14·
          17 hours ago

          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
            10·
            17 hours ago

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

            • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
              4·
              17 hours ago

              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·
                14 hours ago

                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.

  • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
    61·
    13 hours ago

    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).

  • zod000@lemmy.ml
    22·
    18 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.

  • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
    6·
    15 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

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      20·
      21 hours ago

      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·
        19 hours ago

        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·
          11 hours ago

          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·
            11 hours ago

            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·
      21 hours ago

      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.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        21·
        19 hours ago

        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·
          15 hours ago

          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.