Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by binwiederhier 1338 days ago
I've been on Ubuntu 22.04 for a few weeks now, and every now and then Firefox will create a popup notification that says "Firefox needs to be closed to update (12 days left)". When I close it and re-open, Firefox is still not updated. Even when I go to the Software Center and update all apps, it apparently doesn't update snaps.

I'm not entirely sure if Firefox is updateable via the UI. It's truly awful; and that's coming from an Ubuntu lover.

3 comments

Yup, you need to shutdown firefox, open a terminal, run ‘sudo snap refresh’, wait for it to complete, then re-open firefox.

Agreed that the process sucks :)

>Yup, you need to shutdown firefox, open a terminal, run ‘sudo snap refresh’, wait for it to complete, then re-open firefox.

No, you don't need to do this at all. You need to shut down Firefox, open a terminal, run 'sudo snap remove firefox', then 'sudo apt install firefox', wait for it to complete, then re-open Firefox.

(I might be missing a step here)

The step you're missing is to add the Firefox PPA. Ubuntu's Firefox deb is just a Snap installation script.
You also need to futz with apt repo priorities to force it to install the deb package instead of the snap installer -_-
Does running a standard `apt update/upgrade` update the snap packages, even it they're in use?
apt doesn't touch snaps at all afaict
Ubuntu 22.04, got fed up with snap firefox, removed it and installed it from a ppa, pinning appropriately

I still get notifications that to update the snap ai need to close firefox, so I wonder what is really happening…

I uninstalled the snap version and installed the flatpak one. No more lying pop-ups (I close firefox but it never updates when I reopen it).

Bonus, I don't need to be root to update it!

Oh god, I have yet to figure out what it even wants. I assume it is asking me to close firefox to run an update, but I do and nothing is run. And apt upgrade doesn't somehow catch it?

It's amazing that they're managing to make it so confusing that someone who wrote .xsession files can no longer understand it without doing a bunch of research. This shouldn't be tricky... that message, in particular, is absurd. Why would you show that and then not have a button that says "update"?