What use to be the PPA that allowed Ubuntu users to use native .deb packages for Firefox has recently changed to the same meta package that forces installation of Snap and the Firefox snap package.
I am having to remove the meta package, then re-uninstall the snap firefox, then re-uninstall Snap, then install pin the latest build I could get (firefox_116.0.3+build2-0ubuntu0.22.04.1~mt1_arm64.deb) to keep the native firefox build.
I’m so done with Ubuntu.
Valid opinion and immutable distros like silverblue might be where the future is headed.
It’s not the point though, I’m not going with a distro that tries to force their proprietary solution on me.
Not a fan of immutable distros like Silverblue because you’re giving a lot of control to the upstream, unless you have the ability and time to maintain those system images yourself. And if you’re doing that, except for within an organization, there’s not a huge reason to not just use a traditional distro.
If you don’t want that control, they’re great.
In NixOS you can do an overlay and just make your own package. If the package works, you can submit it to the NUR. If it’s good, you can maintain it in the official channel. I’m doing both, the crappy fork of some GUI is in the NUR, the underlying service is maintained by me in nixpkgs
Nix had a huge learning curve for most folks, but it doesn’t suffer most of my complaints about control.
Ironically a full Ubuntu modular system made up of a bunch of snaps wouldn’t necessarily either. One of the cool things about snaps is that they can hold the kernel and other lower level things so you could build a “snap”-together immutable system out of various components.
Silverblue and its variants are a monolithic system image though.