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] 11 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Yeah they've been doing that for a while

[–] Revan343 23 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

What benifit does Mint have over Debian for anything graphical?

[–] Revan343 8 points 16 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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I battled that for about a year and then ditched Debian based diatros altogether.

OpenSUSE ftw

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

You could have gone pure Debian. There are no snap shenanigans over there :)

OpenSuse is also a great pick tho!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 17 hours ago

Welcome to 2020, where Debian is once again your trusted distro.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 21 hours ago (8 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 18 hours ago

I've had it happen too. In fact it is what prompted me to move away from Kubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah it's not really a secret

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 21 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] 10 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Docker in a snap is too meta for me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 16 hours ago

Just wait for snap 2.0 which actually runs everything inside docker containers /s

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 day ago (15 children)
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[–] [email protected] 90 points 1 day 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] 40 points 1 day 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] 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Solve the problem. Drop ubunutu

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Or you can just remove snap. I have been running a up-to-date snap-free ubuntu for 2 years

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

I like my operating system to work for me not against me. So no. I'll just never use their shitty spin of Linux and rely on someone that makes a quality distro. Not one that forced it's users to use their pile of shit proprietary nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day 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] 61 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (7 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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] 2 points 14 hours ago

Thats... odd. The installer packages aren't really that different. When was this?

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago (9 children)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day 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] 20 points 1 day ago (16 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago

Jesus Christ this is Windows-tier insane computing behaviour from Ubuntu. Fuck Ubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day 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] 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

Switch to Debian and you'll be fine :)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day 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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