Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 8, 2020 21:06 UTC (Wed) by wazoox (subscriber, #69624)
In reply to: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages by revmischa
Parent article: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Yup, they could simply build their own package from Debian source package, it should be pretty straightforward.

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 9, 2020 7:23 UTC (Thu) by Nemo_bis (guest, #88187) [Link] (8 responses)

I doubt anything is straightforward when packaging Chromium, but indeed if the problem is "packaging Chromium is hard" then surely the solution is to cooperate with others who need to do it? Sadly it might need a sort of fork to keep removing all the proprietary stuff and antifeatures at every release, but if all distributions contribute then it might be sustainable.

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 9, 2020 9:39 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (5 responses)

Personally I think web browsers like Chromium and Firefox do not belong in stable releases of the distros, since they aren't supportable in the same way as most packages are.

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 9, 2020 11:25 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

Isn't that exactly the reasoning for packaging it as a snap?

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 10, 2020 7:37 UTC (Fri) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

It is. In fact I run Debian Buster but install my Firefox via Snap because I prefer to have a more up to date Firefox rather than sticking to the ESR build. It may well come via Canonical's snap store but the package itself is built by Mozilla.

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 9, 2020 21:51 UTC (Thu) by NGRhodes (guest, #132735) [Link] (1 responses)

Don't forget Debian packages Firefox ESR in its stable release.

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 12, 2020 6:24 UTC (Sun) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

Mozilla supports ESR for one year, after that one has to update it by a never version. Which still implies that Debian stable has to update it several times during their support cycle.

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 14, 2020 11:05 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

It is not fair to put Firefox and Chromium in the same bag. I was working around the Firefox support and yes, building Firefox is complicated, but it is because it is a complex program, not because some large advertising company just throws randomly code over the fence. Mozilla people were always technical, and we were and are able to provide competent builds of the browser.

OK, I don’t know enough about Chromium, but I can see that my colleague who works on packaging it in SUSE, is getting a bit green around the time of release, and I have never had the courage to ask about his alcohol consumption in that time.

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 9, 2020 10:29 UTC (Thu) by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836) [Link]

pop!os has its own ppa, pinned to a higher priority than Ubuntu's shim package; this was the pop!os solution. How is it working out? Apparently it's based on the debian chromium package, but this morning, it was three releases behind.

Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Posted Jul 9, 2020 12:51 UTC (Thu) by simyannis (guest, #139986) [Link]

They already do this, with LMDE (LinuxMint Debian Edition).
LMDE was their backup project, if Canonical messed Ubuntu so much they could switch to that and dump Ubuntu.