Fortunately Linux Mint will continue to package it as a deb.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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April Fools?
If only. It’d be a real April fool’s if Canonical announced they were abandoning snap and throwing their supory behind flatpak.
Having other 180° turnarounds in mind, e.g. Unity, which was nice on a netbook, or their display server (I don't recall its name), would it be that surprising if this was real news? This makes it a really good April Fool's joke.
Their display server is Mir. They first chose Wayland. Everyone was excited and started putting their weight behind it. Then their NIH syndrome kicked in and they declared Mir, claiming that Wayland has a lot of deficiencies. Wayland devs contested it and explained why their complaints were wrong. But Canonical never bothered to reply. This irked everyone else and they stayed with Wayland. Eventually, Mir failed to achieve its goal and Canonical decided to convert it to just another Wayland compositor.
Canonical has wasted so much dev time trying to reinvent the wheel, only to go back to using the thing everyone else is using years later.
Thank you.
Funny you should mention it:
“After the initial resistance, some Linux users have started liking Snap, just as few people got attached to Unity. This is a scary situation for us. From Ubuntu One to Unity and Mir, we have abandoned projects in the past. We can do it again for the greater good.”
Read the article, it’s really fun.
Apt. Its fucking apt. Always has been. Always will be.
sudo snap remove thunderbird --purge
Oh snap
apt install thunderbird
I don't use Ubuntu but I threw it on a laptop to give to my dad.
He's a very basic tech user he basically needed a web browser and somewhere to backup/view his photos off his phone, And even he ran into issue with snaps!
I tried to switch everything over to flatpak but the OS just kept pushing back trying to reinstall SnapD until I ran some script off Github, It's the exact "I know better than you" bullshit that pushed me away from Windows.
Boy am I glad I put my dad on Mint.
Then I'll be on the last deb until it no longer works. I'm not going down the proprietary snap route.
Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE all offer excellent alternatives depending on your reasons for staying.
I am on Debian and Pop. However, if they're dropping the deb distribution, what does that mean for the non Ubuntu folk? Maybe I've misunderstood it all?
Ubuntu is (mostly) based on Debian. This is simply a move by Ubuntu to further push their own packaging platform which is effectively proprietary at this time. Debian's own packaging will remain unchanged.
Excellent. Then it doesn't matter to me at least. Thank you for the reply.
Still, i don't trust, nor like the concept of the proprietorial snap system.
They must be trying to set themselves up to be purchased.
Seems like they are only dropping the deb for Ubuntu.
Excellent. Then it doesn't matter to me at least. Thank you
Everything is going to snap in Ubuntu. It's why I don't use it 🤷
It even recently made my life very difficult because something I did recently only worked on chromium non-snap, but ubuntu provides no easy way to use the non-snap version. Most frustrating experience on that distro ever. Unfortunately, it can't be replaced as it's on a relative's computer...
I run Ubuntu on my home servers, simply because I always used it, resources and help are plentiful and it's well documented. I thought.
Took me a while to realize that after moving to a new machine and upgrading to 22.04 docker was installed as a fucking snap and a bunch of my apps didn't work because of that. I got it all running now, but every VM and LXC I'll install going forward will be running Debian instead. Fuck this annoying shit.
Edit: Or I might try out Mint Mate, since it's what I know best (aka Ubuntu) without snaps. What would you guys recommend for a basic homelab?
You could go for the best of both worlds and use Mint LMDE (Debian Edition). But if only using it as a server, plain Debian should be all you need.
Ooooooo, I didn't know about that project! I'll definitely spin up a VM and check LMDE out. Thanks!
you can still use chromium no snap https://askubuntu.com/questions/1386738/how-to-install-chromium-from-the-linux-mint-repositories-in-ubuntu
Yeah, I was sitting next to the laptop's owner who was in a hurry and already huffing and puffing. Didn't want to mess up their system by pinning stuff and installing certs or running into issues with "repository not found" issues. In the end, switching to another computer was much faster.
Ugh had a similar experience at work related to the chromium package. In our case it had to do with the arm64 build of chromium in an environment that can't run snaps (docker), so we were pretty much entirely without a solution.
It can then go from a snap to a superior flatpak real quick.
You mean apt?
Thunderbird on Flathub is already an official package.
HA HA, THIS FUCKING SUCKS 😭
Surprised no one.
Mint 22 is set to include the Thunderbird DEB package...
Any app that can be sandboxed, should. Especially apps that are parsing random data from the internet.
I stand corrected. All programs should have access to anything, anywhere, and be linked to liblzma just in case if some arbitrary file is compressed. Thank you for setting me straight.
Initially I followed this route to avoid Snap version provided by Ubuntu.
Later I just downloaded Tar package from Mozilla, and update it manually.
In short, I just abandoned deb/snap/flatpak altogether.
Just use Betterbird?
Betterbird is the solution. It just works and the system tray icon is a welcome addition. No more needing to use Birdtray for that.