To avoid them for your personal needs, no they’re not hard to avoid. Just don’t install anything yourself via Snap. Use apt, Flatpak instead. Or any other means.
Not entirely accurate. Some apt packages like firefox and chromium just install the corresponding snap.
Snap has it’s use cases, but it should not be a silent substitute for .debs
Yes that’s true and in my opinion perfectly fine. As a developer who’s done some deb packaging work, that’s how I’d migrate from a deb to snap in order to minimize breakage on upgrade, especially if I’m no longer supporting the deb. This strategy also keeps compatibility with scripts that apt install firefox which would otherwise break on upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04. It’s a pretty elegant way to do it.
I can see using snaps when the alternative is to break things. But mozilla team is already packaging as .deb for ubuntu available through the mozillateam ppa.
This seems to be canonical arbitrarily injecting the snap store as a dependency for firefox with no clear benefit and noticeable performance issues
I don’t know who packages what and what the SLAs for each is. That is, who makes the snap, who makes the debs in the mozillateam PPA, is it the same people, are they different with different mandates. What is the security patch expectation for the snap and deb. I suspect that there’s a difference there. What we know for sure is that Ubuntu comes with a security patch expectation for the packages in the base OS along with varying expectations for the packages in the different Ubuntu repositories - main, universe, multiverse, etc. The snap version of Firefox falls under this umbrella. The mozillateam PPA does not. Maybe the latter is also patched as quickly. For users who can’t or don’t want to think about those important details, whatever is shipped with Ubuntu is probably the safest bet.
Not entirely accurate. Some apt packages like firefox and chromium just install the corresponding snap.
Snap has it’s use cases, but it should not be a silent substitute for .debs
Yes that’s true and in my opinion perfectly fine. As a developer who’s done some deb packaging work, that’s how I’d migrate from a deb to snap in order to minimize breakage on upgrade, especially if I’m no longer supporting the deb. This strategy also keeps compatibility with scripts that
apt install firefoxwhich would otherwise break on upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04. It’s a pretty elegant way to do it.I can see using snaps when the alternative is to break things. But mozilla team is already packaging as .deb for ubuntu available through the mozillateam ppa.
This seems to be canonical arbitrarily injecting the snap store as a dependency for firefox with no clear benefit and noticeable performance issues
I don’t know who packages what and what the SLAs for each is. That is, who makes the snap, who makes the debs in the mozillateam PPA, is it the same people, are they different with different mandates. What is the security patch expectation for the snap and deb. I suspect that there’s a difference there. What we know for sure is that Ubuntu comes with a security patch expectation for the packages in the base OS along with varying expectations for the packages in the different Ubuntu repositories - main, universe, multiverse, etc. The snap version of Firefox falls under this umbrella. The mozillateam PPA does not. Maybe the latter is also patched as quickly. For users who can’t or don’t want to think about those important details, whatever is shipped with Ubuntu is probably the safest bet.