Comment by notabotiswear
9 hours ago
You can de-snap Ubuntu itself.
Dunno about the this release, but till 24.4 it was simply a matter of removing some packages then holding/masking the primary snapd one, followed by manually adding the official PPAs for Mozilla’s stuff (or just use the Flatpak).
Of course, there’s still the philosophical and long term issues with staying on a distro that’s promoting and continuosuly expanding the thing you dislike…
This is a bad strategy, I fell victim for. I configured so it would use apt instead of snap package, but canonical silently stopped shipping packages and I was running some packages that were not updated for a long time and debugging weird bugs, because I didn't assume that this was a problem. If one wants Ubuntu, one must accept snap. If you use apt with disallowed transition to snap, you might be stuck with old packages that were transitioned to snap.
My choice for now is Debian, didn't finish transition yet, very annoying to plan this in my schedule. I'll churn from Ubuntu after more than 15 years of daily driving... I also don't like ubuntu user with uid:gid 1000 in their Docker images. It's a cancer.
This is what I do, because on my work computer IT imposed Ubuntu.
I initially tried to just use snaps but firefox was crashing quite often so I had to go with adding the mozilla's repository and of course configure the fake "firefox" package that actually installs the snap to be low priority for apt.
Ubuntu keeps adding snap back again and again so I got tired of removing it each time. Someone said to try Pop!_OS so maybe I'll try that.
You can disable that too and it won't be installed.
Like someone else said, if I have to dig through settings to do that then I might as well use Windows. It's better to use something that doesn't even have snap in the first place via another distro than play cat and mouse with Canonical.