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Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related, Firefox-from-snap completely broke for me recently in a way that I couldn't be bothered to diagnose ("error: cannot communicate with server: Post http://localhost/v2/snaps/firefox: dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory").

It prompted me to finally wipe Snap fully from my system and install Firefox from the Mozilla PPA. The only other Snap app I currently use is IntelliJ, and that has issues in its Snap packaging according to the mighty Serge, so I'm switching to a tar.gz install for that.

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    ##  app-conf/apt/nosnap.pref
    # To prevent repository packages from triggering the installation of snap,
    # this file forbids snapd from being installed by APT.

    Package: snapd
    Pin: release a=*
    Pin-Priority: -10

    ### Remove snapd applications and service
    snap remove --purge firefox
    snap remove --purge gnome-3-38-2004
    snap remove --purge gtk-common-themes
    snap remove --purge bare
    snap remove --purge core20
    snap remove --purge snapd
    apt-get remove --yes snapd

    # This will prevent snapd from any repository

tested on Ubuntu jammy

The hero we need, thank you!

Writing from memory, so might be a bunch of b/s... still. I'm afraid this isn't enough and something like apt-get update <something> can trigger full reinstall of Snap and a bunch of other junk installed with it.

I've used the pin apt to prevent snap reinstalling approach on multiple machines for years with no recurrence of snap.

The Flatpak supposedly works fine, but I'm guessing if you had a Snap installed to begin with, you were probably on Ubuntu or one of its derivatives and getting both Snap and Flatpaks to coexist may have been untenable.

I've been meaning to switch, but I'm on a certain RPM-based distro where the Firefox package in particular goes through its own set of QA testing, so I'm happy to stay on that.

I have never had a snap package I've installed that I didn't have to immediately uninstall and find the .deb for because the snap ran into a bunch of weird issues. I hate snap I hate whoever thought it was a good idea and I hope they constantly have bump in their sock that they are unable to fix that does not relieve until the day they get rid of snaps.

That's really too kind to the snap designers.

Some people, when confronted with systems problems, think "I know, I'll make another system in a container". Now they have twice as many problems.

Recently had to configure a Linux laptop for someone and they chose Ubuntu for it.

Snap was one of the first things I removed (was a tough fight though). This way of software management is outright hostile to personal computers (as in run by people, as in contrast to servers, mostly run by other programs).

There were some problems with the version from Mozilla PPA though too... cannot recall at the moment. I think some configuration was missing right after install.

Too bad the ppa doesn't seem to work on Debian proper. Yesterday I configured a new laptop with Debian Bookworm but I don't want Firefox ESR, I want the latest stable. Snap sucks, the Flatpak version has some limitations that the real version doesn't, I don't want to run a mixed stable/sid distro and the only 3rd party repository I found was hosted on sourceforge, which I just plain don't trust. So it's 2023 and I'm still stuck manually downloading and unpacking .tar.bz2 files into /opt every other week.

> So it's 2023 and I'm still stuck manually downloading and unpacking .tar.bz2 files into /opt every other week.

You should have to do that only once, then Firefox updates itself just like on Windows or MacOS. I ran this setup (Debian stable + Firefox installed by unpacking a tar) for years and never had an issue. Maybe you should unpack it in a directory where your normal user can write files to let Firefox handle the update.

I very much don't want that. My regular user not being able to modify the firefox files is a feature to me.

Meanwhile on Arch: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-nightly-bin

So much easier than faffing about with six bazillion dh-whatever scripts.

[Article author/submitter here]

If you follow the link in the story to the older story about Firefox ESR on Debian, it describes 2 different ways to install natively-packaged .DEB versions of Firefox $CURRENT on Debian.

Does the mozilla ppa provide the www-browser metapackage?

If not, you might run into [this bug](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/uj58i5/psa_fix...)

FWIW my solution was using equivs to create a dummy package to satisfy www-browser and installing that.

Another fun issue with the snap version: due to filesystem sandboxing, it can't open file:///... URLs.

I’m pretty sure I’ve got some passwords on my system in the Firefox password holder for the Snap version, some for the Deb version, and not sure which are where, but I’m afraid to touch that whole thing for fear of deleting something important.

So, here I am, stuck with Snap. Eww.

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