yeah well, you can’t have it your way on Ubuntu when Canonical FORCES you to use snaps (heck they even hacked apt to prefer snaps instead of debs)
These are two incredibly persistent pieces of misinformation…
- Canonical provides snaps for Ubuntu. This is no more “forcing” you to use snaps than they force you to use debs, or than Fedora forces you to use flatpaks/rpms.
- Apt doesn’t “prefer snaps” by any means. Canonical provides transitional packages for certain packages that got migrated from debs to snaps, but the steps for using another apt repository to replace one of these transitional packages are the same as the steps for replacing any other package provided in your base repos with one from a different repository: You add the other repository, and you tell apt to prefer that repository for the specific packages.
If that is true, then why are deb packages provided by Canonical for Ubuntu dummied out?
Canonical FORCES you to use snaps, there is no other way to look at this.
Canonical provides transitional packages for packages that they’ve decided to provide as snaps. They’re not forcing anyone to use snaps, they’re saying “if you want the default we provide you, we’re providing you with a snap.” KDE Neon (my current distro, which is downstream of Ubuntu) has decided that they want to use the deb packages from packages.mozilla.org, so they provide an override. If you want to use the deb from packages.mozilla.org, you could grab KDE Neon’s repository deb and install that, or just set up the mozilla repository and use the same pin file they already have.
This is like saying “Debian FORCES you to use libav” Debian moved from ffmpeg to libav for a while. No, they provided libav and made transitional packages for this drop-in replacement. Some people didn’t like that and made their own ffmpeg repos, and the process for using their separate ffmpeg rather than Debian’s transitional packages was the same as the process for using Firefox from a different repository. (I was one of the people used some third-party ffmpeg repositories, and I was glad when they switched back to ffmpeg and provided libav to ffmpeg transitional packages.)
Does the fact that the Ubuntu repositories don’t contain Keysmith mean “Ubuntu PROHIBITS you from using Keysmith?”
They do not prevent you from adding repos and installing from those. They don’t even try to make it slightly more difficult to do so than it was before. Microsoft force you to use edge. Cannot really disable it. Can’t remove it. Can’t simply switch away from it. See the difference?
If you were running a previous version of Ubuntu, where you had deb packages which worked, over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you), which were unable to see additional hard drives, USB pens, printers, scanners or cameras, couldn’t use plug-ins, couldn’t use 3rd party templates or presets, and didn’t respect any system settings for fonts/text size, icon placement and so on.
Snaps were fine for “aisleriot solitaire” or “calculator” (assuming you didn’t mind a 5 minute loading time) or other things which didn’t need to interact with any file or system or device, but for actual programs for people trying to do work? Bag of shite.
Now, I imagine some years later they must have fixed some of this rubbish, and I read recently they might have finally done something about permissions, but no, they didn’t ask anyone before they swapped working programs for completely broken snaps. They forced it on their existing users, and some of us bear grudges.
over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you),
You don’t need to lie. A full list of debs that have been transitioned to snaps is:
- Firefox
- Thunderbird
- Chromium
