 I discovered Ubuntu, 2024 edition (no I’m not switching). Once installed, it comes with Firefox preinstalled, with the icon showing up in the GNOME dock. There’s a ‘firefox’ .deb package installed, but hey ‘dpkg -L firefox’ shows that it’s almost empty, with little more than /usr/bin/firefox, and — surprise! — ~/.snap/firefox occupies quite a bit of space. Hmm! 🤔 16 comments
 @civodul when you try to install things with apt it suggests you to use snap instead and so on... pretty crazy Turns out there’s a “fake” (transitional?) ‘firefox’ .deb: /usr/bin/firefox in that package ends with: exec /snap/bin/firefox "$@". And ‘debian/firefox.preinst’ basically runs ‘snap install firefox’. QED. I found this quite evil because I thought you could still choose between apt and snap. That’s not quite the case. Anyway, that Firefox packaged who knows how has all the surveillance things turned on: completions by Google in the location bar before history completion, Google as the default search engine, “telemetry”, and of course no ad blocker or anything by default. This has a very “Windows feel”. Anecdote: the (pretty) installer would crash badly at the sight of the NTFS partitions or something that were on the target disk. I partitioned it with ‘fdisk’ and then the installer was able to proceed. I remember of a similar bug that was reported (and fixed) against the Guix System installer a while back; nice to see we’re in good company.  @civodul Edit: or is that no longer the case?   @civodul The non-snap option was removed in Ubuntu 22.04, at which point flavors like Kubuntu that hadn’t made the snap their default in 21.10 also had to switch. (This was one of the last straws inducing me to just switch back to Debian and stop trying to make my Ubuntu more Debian-like.) There was a fair amount of public scrutiny at the time, but I guess most anti-snap folks have found their workarounds by now: I don’t really see much ongoing discussion. @civodul I suspect the reason for the wrapper deb package is to make the presence of some web browser visible to fill other deb packages’ dependencies.  @civodul
It'd be a little funny if the founder and one of the core maintainer of Guix didn't even run Guix as his main/everyday OS. |
Gregory's Server
@civodul oh snap!