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by foxhill 958 days ago
oh god i just updated to ubuntu 22.04 and it’s a been a nightmare. i use firefox, and ubuntu want me to use the snap-based distribution now. it didn’t tell me that’d be a thing, so i was surprised when opening firefox that:

* it took ages to start up cold

* my window theming was ignored

* my bookmarks and extensions were just.. gone

* this was marketed as a benefit to me

infuriated, i added the mozilla PPA, and told apt to get firefox from there. that was fine, nothing was deleted, and it all worked again.

imagine my next surprise, when i go to use it the next day, and the snap variant was back! running ‘apt dist-upgrade’ fixed it again, but this happens every day. something is silently re-installing firefox every night, and i have run out of energy to find it and stop it.

when i next have the time, i’m dropping this distro and switching to arch or even perhaps gentoo again.

but hey, at least with linux i have the choice :)

oh, and whilst i’m here, wayland is still - unfortunately - not desktop ready.

3 comments

Are you me? I started a job mid of last year and got a laptop with Ubuntu 22.04 and it was a shitshow, especially due to Snaps and wayland.

Imagine this, you install Firefox Snap, you install the Firefox Keypass extension, then you install the Keypass Snap, then you discover they don't work together because of the Snap containerization isolation. So you uninstall all that and start installing apt packages via the command line. And then screen sharing didn't work thanks to Wayland. Then I turned off Wayland but then I got screen tearing and lost touchpad gestures. Nice.

And Ubuntu is supposed to be THE Linux distro. The flasghip. The crown jewel. How are you supposed to be the Windows killer when basic stuff that works out of the box on Windows is horribly broken?

Yeah Snaps and Wayland sounded like a good idea in theory, but not when they break so much useful apps and functionality that we take for granted and need for work.

Does the Ubuntu dev team not dog-food their own product that they release such a broken mess? Or do they use it in a different way than us non Linux-dev plebs?

I guess Ubuntu devs use Debian or something. There is no way a Linux distro dev who can configure Debian in his sleep would put up with all this BS. Even if Ubuntu is enforced internally you should be able to de-Canonicalize it almost completely.

Or maybe the Canonical employees have remove-bs.sh script they keep up to date internally?

Here’s how to remove all snaps entirely and block snapd from being reinstalled via pinning.

https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2022/04/remove-snap-blo...

I run Ubuntu 22.04 on a Lenovo t460 and Windows on a w540. On the t460, I see none of the problems you report. It is a reliable, solid, and fast system. On the w540 running windows, I see many of the problems you reported. Are you sure you are not running Windows??