Snaps: a failed experiment

[Liam Proven]

On 21/09/2025 11:41 pm, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Ok, I had enough, and finally uninstalled the firefox snap, and hooked 
> up the mozzilateam PPA in order to actually be able to use Firefox in a 
> VNC desktop.

Why the Mozillateam one? Why not just fetch it directly from Mozilla? It 
has published an official repo for more than a year now.

> It's been a known issue for SEVERAL YEARS that some kind of a permission 
> issue prevents the Firefox snap from working in a VNC session.

Has it? News to me, but then, I don't use VNC for this.

> So, problem solved. If someone would give me a holler, maybe in a 
> decade, or so, when snaps are fully functional on a modern desktop, I'd 
> appreciate it.

TBH, I have never seen these problems, but there are reasons. I use 
Unity, and Firefox can't integrate with Unity's global menu bar. So I 
use Waterfox instead. It's available as 3rd party DEB packages and an 
AppImage, or a tarball, and none of those are confined or sandboxed and 
they all work perfectly. I use Chrome as my spare fallback browser for 
when things don't work in Firefox (Facebook and Twitter, for instance) 
and it's a native .deb as well, so no issues there either.

But your argument reads to me like "I can't use this tool therefore the 
tool is broken and no good and I am going to attack the people who wrote 
it."

I don't use that specific tool. The tool I do use doesn't have the problems.

But in recent years, I stopped fighting snap and have leaned in instead. 
I've removed all my external repos (except for the 2 browsers) and 
replaced all my external .deb-packaged apps as snaps instead. Opera, 
Vivaldi, Slack, Ferdium, Spotify, Telegram, Signal -- all snaps.

It all just works, and version-to-version upgrades are much smoother and 
safer now.

-- 
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