After creating a fresh installation of Ubuntu 24.04, I installed DEB Firefox from APT by following Mozilla’s instructions from here. But I noticed that it was secretly replaced with Snap Firefox. I was able to verify this by checking the About Firefox page. This is the third time I noticed this.
But it’s not obvious either. When I say ‘apt install firefox’, specially after adding their repository to sources.list, I’d expect to get a .deb from mozilla. Silently overriding my commands rubs me in a very wrong way.
It takes a little more than just adding a different repository to your package manager, you have to tell apt which to prefer:
echo ’
Package: *
Pin: origin packages.mozilla.org
Pin-Priority: 1000
Package: firefox*
Pin: release o=Ubuntu
Pin-Priority: -1’ | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla
True, but more often than not mozilla should have newer packages on their repository than any distribution. And the main problem still is that Ubuntu changed apt and threw snap in to the mix where it doesn’t belong.
I’m not disagreeing with anything you’ve said?
I’m saying that just adding Mozilla’s PPA to your sources won’t change apt’s behavior when installing Firefox unless you tell apt to prefer the package offered by the Mozilla PPA.
As someone who uses Kubuntu as a daily driver, I’m well aware of the snap drama and have worked around it using the method I pasted above.
Even though it’s an underhanded move by Cannonical, I’m still glad the OS is open source since it makes the workaround so trivial.