Snap is a really cool system and in some ways it's better than Flatpak. I understand the maintainability benefits over repo-packaged software. But, consistently, Snap-packaged software Does Not Work; Chromium broke when they snapified it, and now Firefox is broken on @ubuntu too.
I can't report bugs against it, because the support page for Mozilla is useless and the distro doesn't accept bugs against the snap version - even though, from a user perspective, the change is simple. "Firefox on Ubuntu used to be really good, and now it doesn't work."
I don't know what to say other than,
Canonical, you broke my heart. I've been a die-hard Ubuntu user since Lucid - on my first ever computer of my own! - and I think I'm done.
I'm getting a Lenovo 2242 NVMe SSD for my T480 in today, and I think I'm going to install Fedora.
I hate complaining about distros. Package maintainers work really hard to solve really complex problems with lots of constraints. But this isn't about the Ubuntu repo maintainers, or those at Debian - it's about Canonical making bad decisions about the future of the distro. If we're to criticize proprietary software for taking away our choices, we have to criticize free software too.
And yes, I have the technical freedom to build Firefox myself and run it that way, but that freedom is meaningless for people without the technical skill and time to do so!
@tindall @ubuntu Same. The Epiphany build is fantastic, but apparently there's a permissions issue that just dumps error messages into the logs like a spambot. And I have no idea how to fix it.
Worse, it appears that snaps just update themselves without letting folks know what's going on. Hope you don't have a breaking change coming through.
Like most Canonical things there's a kernel of a good idea with some stellar hubris regarding implementation. Remembering Ubuntu One all to well.
@tindall I think we need a lingua franca of packages already
@drq We have several - they are all very limited in various ways.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a distro having opinions about how things are packaged. I want that! Hell, I _pay_ for that! But in this case, I think those opinions are wrong.
@tindall uh that's bad :/
@tindall @vfrmedia @ubuntu My password manager uses the native messaging host in chromium to integrate with it. So the browser extension can start a small binary that can read the password store file. To bad the snap can't access anything outside itself. And there is no simple way to change that as a user. So anything using the native messaging host is broken by default under Ubuntu.
Now I'm stuck compiling chromium myself for every update, because I don't want to switch password managers.
@tindall @ubuntu@ubuntu.social both default installs are snapified in Ubuntu? I am afraid to upgrade.
@confusedcharlot Yep! The `chromium` package has just installed the snap for a while; `firefox` does so in 22.04
@tindall I'm currently building chromium for Android, I may have to expand targets.
@confusedcharlot @tindall We tend to just use the tarball release, although the only reason we're doing that is because we need to run the beta version to be allowed to install our own extensions. Grrr.
It handles auto-update by itself (that link says it doesn't, nope, it does!) and is /very obnoxious/ about it.
@tindall I've been using Mint for 9 months now, and it very consistently worked for me without many issues at all. Maybe that's a distro you might want to look into, also it's compatible with Ubuntu packages.
@LunaDragofelis I would love to!! I really want to find a distro with first-class KDE support tho
@bearislive Basically, Snap is a format and system for letting upstream projects directly push updates in a sandboxed manner, easing load on the Ubuntu team and improving security.
However in the case of Chromium and, now, Firefox this leads to a lot of functionality being broken, like WebMIDI, being able to set the default browser, native connection for password managers. Separately, there's a Firefox bug that's causing it to forget my profile info.
@tindall Hmpf that's frustrating. Thanks for explaining! I wonder if the Chromium folks can influence this at all.
@bearislive That's a lost battle, unfortunately; Chromium has been a Snap package for over a year.
This in addition to the fact that I've repeatedly run into showstopper bugs, at the level of significant data loss _in non-snap applications_ - and gotten essentially no resolution or prioritization on them. This issue has been open for over two years: https://github.com/ubuntu/snapcraft-desktop-helpers/issues/205