Not sure what others are doing to use Ubuntu (23.04) without snaps, but this is what I am doing:
- for Firefox I found a guide here
- for chromium I am actually using the Linux Mint packages (which work absolutely fine), and I have just set up a small repository I can add to apt:
deb [arch=amd64 allow-insecure=yes] http://snapless.cmeerw.net victoria upstream
- this just syncs from Linux Mint and only republishes chromium in the Packages file (with downloads redirected to a Linux Mint mirror). BTW, I am not signing these…
What are others doing?
Running Debian. Snapless and Ubuntuless Ubuntu
I switched two of our boxes over to Debian “Bookworm”. And so far, I am completely happy with the change. On desktop, it’s still a little rough around the edges, and a few oddities need to be ironed out here and there, but that’s nothing compared with the ocean of pain that were snaps for me and my company.
Still a little nostalgic, though, after 17 years of Ubuntu 🫠
Now that Debian is will to ship “non-free” drivers and firmware, I think it has become far more viable.
It always did, though. Just unofficially.
Was it unofficial? I thought it was merely opt-in, but still official
Yeah just in separate repo that wasn’t enabled by default
The install images that included the non-free-firmware were marked as “unofficial”.
Snapless Ubuntu is called Linux Mint, no guide needed.
but it’s limited to Ubuntu LTS versions
that’s not necessarily a downside.
How is only having an LTS version vs. having a choice between using an LTS version or a non-LTS version not a downside?
The LTS versions are more stable, so why bother with non-LTS versions? If you want faster updates, you probably want a rolling release like Arch or openSUSE Tumbleweed.
I’ve used a lot of Ubuntu over the years starting on 9.04. Let me tell you the six months releases are ass and always have been.
Also I’m switching to Debian.
True but it depends on your usecase- of you need all the fancy new stuff and want to move on quickly you should go another route instead of fucking around with forced software you do not want. Maybe Debian testing or Fedora? If you do not care about the newest stuff I guess Mint is a perfect fit.
Just use debian testing or unstable.
This.
I just went from Arch to Debian 12 Bookworm. Running the stable branch, but so far most of the packages are rather recent. Kernel is 6.1 instead of 6.4, but I could switch to the Testing or Unstable branch to get the “bleeding edge” packages/kernels if I need to. But honestly so far it’s been a real pleasure to use. Everything is just working and is stable.
Debian 12 was just released. Compare it to Arch even six months from now and see how current the packages are. Then compare it again in 18 months.
I am a happy Arch user but I must admit the constant kernel updates can seem a bit much. An experiment I have considered is moving to Debian 12 and using distrobox to get access to Arch repos and the AUR. I would use the Debian stuff as much as possible but for anything missing or anything that I really need to be more current, I could just fall back to the Arch repos.
It could be the best of both worlds.
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FYI Arch offers linux-lts. You can install that and linux-lts-headers and switch grub/whatever your boot loader is to default to that and forget about running the bleeding edge kernel. Linux 6.4.x has been literal dog shit with several ugly amdgpu bugs and suspend is randomly borked about 1/3 of the times I try to suspend my PC for the evening (and issue I’m not experiencing alone).
So, yeah. Give the linux-lts linux-lts-headers packages a try. You get the benefits Arch’s cutting-edge packages on a stable kernel.
I switched from Arch to Debian Stable as well. I grabbed the Xanmod kernel repo for a more recent kernel, and use Flatpaks and Homebrew for some cutting edge stuff. I don’t miss anything from Arch so far.
don’t miss anything from Arch so far.
same I switched to debian testing. best experience. never had issues since a year. Arch usually borked once in this period.
Debian testing works fine for me.
Just use Debian Stable
He mentioned wanting more up to date packages. I like debian stable, but it’s not exactly known for being the latest and greatest.
He can get single packages from a different source without sacrificing the whole system
I wouldn’t consider using testing a sacrifice.
Irrational FOMO
My solution is using a distro that doesn’t try to force snaps on me.
If you want the ubuntu base, why not use mint?
Mint would be based on Ubuntu 22.04, but I’d like to have something more up-to-date. I believe all other .deb based distros have the same issue that they are not as up-to-date as Ubuntu 23.04?
None of them are like arch where you can read news about an update and find that you just have it installed already.
Given you’re on ubuntu and therefore not at the bleeding edge anyways, it won’t be a big difference. My personal choice for stuff that just needs to work is debian. I carry debian LTS with the full KDE pack on my ventoy and it’s been great. I also heard very good things about testing and Sid, but I haven’t tried them myself.
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I just use Linux Mint :)
Feels like you don’t want to use Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is going the way of snap-only and it might as well pick an Ubuntu-based GNOME distro. There’s a bunch out there, but PopOS can be pretty easily stripped down to a vanilla GNOME system. You could even just modify Mint and install GNOME on top of that.
How about VanillaOS? That’s an Ubuntu (soon to be debian) based plain GNOME system with support for a range of packaging formats.
You could also go for Manjaro GNOME edition, but not as stable.
Zorin is cool but not as barebones for a GNOME spin.
Could also look at Linux Mint (Cinnamon/MATE/XFCE) or Feren OS (KDE).
True. I focussed on the GNOME options for OP but KDE-Neon is a great snapless Ubuntu distro
Oh yeah, for sure. I was just throwing out some other ones to check out if they had a different preference on DE or just wanted to check out something different from GNOME. Just adding on to the options!
So you’re using Mint with extra steps.
I am using a single package from Mint, the rest is Ubuntu 23.04. Mint would otherwise be based on Ubuntu 22.04?
Yes, Mint 21.x is based on Jammy.
Unless you get LMDE which goes back even more to be based on Debian directly.
Pop!_OS is “Snapless”. Our Firefox builds come directly from Mozilla in the deb format.
Sure, but what about your chromium builds? (as mentioned in my post, replacing the firefox snap with a firefox deb is easy enough on Ubuntu, chromium is the more difficult one to deal with)
Chromium is better served through third parties like Vivaldi. Or by Chrome from Google. Most of which offer debs. We recommend Firefox though.
Switched to Linux Mint. But not because of Snaps but rather RAM usage. Mint is lighter and faster. On cold boot it uses just 745mb versus 1.6GB on Ubuntu Gnome.
I don’t mind Snaps but I also won’t go out of my way to install it because there is no must-have snap that I need.
I love mint. I use it everywhere. You wouldn’t recognize it anywhere I use it though. I customize the hell out of it. Right now I got this retro Ubuntu thing going on, running Unity DE and no snaps. not that I’m wholly against them, I just don’t have them.
This may be useful for you (Especially if you use KDE Plasma) : Automated script to remove all traces of Snap, including reinstalling a standalone version of Firefox.
If I were going to do snapless Ubuntu, I’d probably just install Mint. It seems a lot easier.
Of course, since I use Fedora I don’t have to worry about any of that nonsense. I gave up on Ubuntu years ago.
You can just download the firefox tarball from their own site. And that will just update itself.
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Moving to a different distro :) Experimenting with nixos right now, already got native Firefox working :)
NixOS is amazing. I use it as a daily currently, but I haven’t yet unlocked the full power of Nix.
I do nothing.
- I use the Firefox snap. It takes like 800 extra milliseconds to start up on my 10y old laptop and it moves my profile dir. It otherwise impacts my life not at all and is just fine. If it ever bothers me, there PPAs, flatpak, or a dozen other ways to install Firefox that are all perfectly simple.
- I install other stuff from flatpaks or PPAs or using docker.
The angst around snap is inscrutable to me. There are 30 million easy ways to install software and they all work on Ubuntu. There is nothing in my life that’s easier to ignore than snap.
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Tell me more about why I care that snap is setting up loop devices and not that docker is setting up virtual ethernet devices and nftables chains. System tools do system things, news at 11.
I say again, this impacts my life not at all and there is nothing easier to ignore than snap.
I’m basically doing the same, but those “pending update, close the app to avoid disruptions” popups are kind of disrupting.
… those “pending update, close the app to avoid disruptions” popups are kind of disrupting.
I don’t exactly disagree that it’s slightly irritating but:
- No one declares war on an operating system the way snap haters have over a “restart to update” message. It’s an irritation, but it’s not an irritation proportional to the response snap gets out of people.
- Restarting to enable an update or complete an update is not something unique to snap. Except for a tiny number of very advanced live-patching systems like the one some kernel updaters use, every updater either nags you to shutdown to do the update, nags you to restart to finish the update, or doesn’t nag you and the update just doesn’t take effect till you restart (apt falls in this category and it’s not unambiguously better than nagging because you’re silently vulnerable when security patches are shipped until you restart). So again, this is just an extremely unremarkable thing that tons of updaters deal with similarly.
Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the “war on Ubuntu” going on is more due to Ubuntu’s history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they’ve found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.
EDIT: I also notice to a lesser degree a weird fanboy-ism around Flatpak which I think also contributes to it. Pretty much when Flatpak came out the attitude was, “this is the standard for containerized binaries, no alternatives or exceptions will be tolerated”, and immediately they went on the warpath to destroy both snap and appimage (though to be fair appimage really isn’t great).
Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the “war on Ubuntu” going on is more due to Ubuntu’s history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they’ve found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.
I agree with just about every word here. I lived through all this stuff. Mir and Unity were hugely disruptive to the OSS desktop community beyond Ubuntu and I was as salty about them as anyone. If someone is aware of this history and just fucking done with Ubuntu’s bullshit they’ll get no flak from me. I rarely see this coherent an argument made though, it’s much more often “snap bad, use this other distro that’s downstream of Ubuntu and shares all the same foundations but has a different default desktop and disables snap by default”, which I think is pretty nonsense and is rampant in the comments of this post.
But I’ve done my share of distro hopping and if someone wants to use something else for any reason or no reason… more power to them. I will make the counterpoint that no one has to care about snap specifically and if you just pretend it doesn’t exist then your life will be no different. And if history is any indicator, snap has about 2y left before they abandon it anyway.
True facts