Jesus Christ this is Windows-tier insane computing behaviour from Ubuntu. Fuck Ubuntu.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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Switch to Debian and you'll be fine :)
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.
It's a dilemma; most Windows and Mac users would benefit from that kind of locked-down, idiot-proof format. Even having the choice of multiple repos is too much for them. So while I personally hate it, that's what most people (i.e. non-Linux users) want and need.
I recommend Ubuntu as the beginner distro for everyone, but with the hope that they eventually drop the training wheels and switch to Debian.
That’s why I recommend mint. You have all the benefits of ubuntu but without the corporate stuff. And flatpak instead of snap.
It's a known and documented issue that Ubuntu does. They secretly install the Snap version, even if you tried to install the Deb package. This is an issue since years: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1345385/how-can-i-stop-apt-from-installing-snap-packages (posted 3 years and 7 months ago)
My problem is not like that. I’m aware that when the user runs(without adding Mozilla’s apt repository),
sudo apt install firefox
the 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, that's the exact issue. Ubuntu does that for years. You use apt to install deb, but Ubuntu installs silently the Snap version. The article I linked was talking about that almost 4 years ago and talks about how to stop that. It's an old issue not many are aware off.
For awhile I was getting firefox crashes in Mint all the time. Turns out it was the snap version being unstable.
How did you get snap on mint?! 😆I once tried it as a noob and mint was always “snap bad! Don’t do this! You will regret” even on try to circumvent it 🤣
I swear it was the default already installed. Maybe I'm misremembering.
Mint never preinstalled the snap. They package their own version of Firefox. I believe they have an agreement with Mozilla.
Maybe it was that i had to install the snap version (or maybe flatpak?) and uninstall theirs, which fixed the crashes. I thought it was a hardware issue for awhile because it was so random.
Why even enable snaps? It's like asking to have headaches.
Ubuntu uses Snap as first-class method to install software. So if a piece of software is available as DEB or Snap, Ubuntu will always use Snap.
I’m aware that when the user runs(without adding Mozilla’s apt repository),
sudo apt install firefox
the 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.
The whole apt ecosystem is kind of a mess, if you ask me. Debian stable updates on archeological timescales, Debian testing just isn't a very good rolling release disto, you're better off with Arch or OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want to actually use a rolling release as a daily driver, Ubuntu is a mess of annoying corporate decisions I hate from Canonical, and all the others are all just kind of disjointed in how they try to fix those issues.
My personal favorite is Mint. They just try to make Ubuntu with some classic, boring desktop design and minus the more controversial Canonical decisions, but obviously that's not everyone's cup of tea. I dunno, there is no perfect distro, you just have to find the one that for you it takes the least amount of effort to fix. Ubuntu really just kind of makes it a pain in the butt to fix all their weirdness though.
Debian testing just isn’t a very good rolling release disto
What makes you say that?
It's not as up to date as other rolling releases, unlike stable it doesn't get security patches right away, it gets frozen for months during the switch from one stable to the next, and in my fairly limited experience it just has more bugs. It's not bad, but it's a testing branch. It's not intended as a daily driver, and it shows.
One of the reason I moved to MX Linux, it is Debian based, always latest everything, like 6.12.11 kernel, my FF just got updated to 135.0, and it is no systemd, no flatpak, no snap, everything is DEB, and stable.