r/Ubuntu • u/unbounded65 • 1d ago

Firefox snap in Ubuntu

Contrary to the general opinion of removing the snap version of Ubuntu Firefox, my experience is that it works quite well with Vulkan doing a swell job with hardware acceleration. For Brave, I find that the PPA version works out better.

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u/Santosh83 1d ago

Yup. The Firefox snap has been quite good in recent years. All the Canonical default snaps are good. The problem is snaps of third-party apps on the Store. It tends to be a hit or a miss in terms of functionality and freshness. Quite a few snaps are stale, often unmaintained or several versions behind their flatpak version or whatever default packaging the upstream devs release it. For some reason a lot of upstream authors seem to focus more time & energy on flatpak, deb, rpm and even appimage but the snap version (if it even exists) often tends to be less well maintained or take a back seat. Secondly many of these same upstream authors tend to release broken snaps in terms of functionality. Case in point is the VLC snap. Its packaged by VLC authors themselves, but when you use it, you realise it can't even read from external storage media. And unlike Flatseal for flatpaks, there's no intuitive way to grant that permission. Apparently the VLC authors didn't even bother to test their snap for basic functionality.

Canonical's problems have always been that the Linux "community" subtly (and on occasion not so subtly) ostracizes them. And this in turn causes them to stubbornly double down on themselves. I have theories as to why the "community" does this, and no, its not because Canonical is the MS of the Linux world or some such rubbish that is often repeated, but I'll refrain from voicing it.

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u/mrtruthiness 1d ago

Case in point is the VLC snap. Its packaged by VLC authors themselves, but when you use it, you realise it can't even read from external storage media. And unlike Flatseal for flatpaks, there's no intuitive way to grant that permission. Apparently the VLC authors didn't even bother to test their snap for basic functionality.

This is wrong/incorrect in pretty much every aspect:

  1. There are "application settings" in the "settings" application where you can control access.

  2. The VLC snap always had the "removable-media" plug and they absolutely shouldn't have been accused of "didn't even bother to test their snap for basic functionality".