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Comment by GlumWoodpecker | Hacker News Reader

This is mostly just a Debian problem, due to their "no non-free software" philosophy, which extends to device drivers. I have never in my days booted a Debian install that worked with wifi out of the box, and I suspect I never will, due to that philosophy.. For that reason, I've stopped trying and I default to Ubuntu (-based) distros instead. All it takes to get rid of snaps forever is `sudo apt purge snapd`.

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> All it takes to get rid of snaps forever is `sudo apt purge snapd`.

That's not enough. Some package could eventually drag it back in.

    $ apt show firefox
    Package: firefox
    ...
    Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd

If you really want to keep it off your system for good, you need something like this:

    $ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snapd
    Package: snapd
    Pin: release a=*
    Pin-Priority: -1
    $

When I try to remove snapd it says it'll also remove ubutu-server-minimal. And that scares me.

Use the moment to replace ubuntu-server with Debian and you'll be glad you did when Canonical decides on its next move to ensnare users. Even when I used Ubuntu - back in the early brown-desktop days when they sent out free CD-ROMs to anyone who wanted one - I never felt tempted to use it on a server since it was never clear to me what it offered that Debian could not deliver while it was clear that keeping Debian up to date was (and is) far easier than doing the same with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu had its place in popularising Linux but they jumped the shark a long time ago, now they are just another player jostling for their own niche.

Thanks for the recommendation. Before I do that I'd have to check which binary drivers I have so I don't end up with a server that has no internet.

And by server I mean that dusty NUC...

In the past you could use the images from here [0] to get installs with wifi firmware, but future versions will have it included in the official images. They've worked out of the box on almost all recent (last 5-10 years) systems I've tried it with.

[0] https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images...

that does not get rid of snaps forever when you want to 'apt install firefox' or any package that is snap only. That's all it takes

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