[kwlug-disc] sadness in Ubuntu land

[Chris Irwin]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2022, at 00:23, Chris Frey wrote:
> Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
> requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
> distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
> or been moved out of Incoming.
> The following information may help to resolve the situation:
> 
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
> firefox : PreDepends: snapd but it is not going to be installed
> E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

It may be as simple as Ubuntu's (snap-installing) deb has a slightly higher version that the one from the third-party repo, rather than a malicious modification to apt itself. You should be able to use apt pinning to say `firefox` should only be installed from a specific repo. This might also prevent the dependency warning message.

A mocked-up /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillateam:

    Package: firefox
    Pin release o=mozillateam
    Pin-Priority: -10

However, I don't actually have an Ubuntu machine to test, so you may need to adjust that. I got this from the following URLs:

  1. https://askubuntu.com/questions/449426/pinning-package-using-own-repository-and-apt-get
  2. https://linux.die.net/man/5/apt_preferences

If you're looking for alternative distros, Fedora is nice. I switched from Ubuntu about 10 years ago now, and have been very happy.

If you're just trying to avoid the startup issues associated with snap, the flatpak firefox from flathub works well. It's provided by Mozilla, and is indistinguishable from the native firefox. I have it installed for troubleshooting and honestly have few issues with it.

-- 
*Chris Irwin*

email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
  web: https://chrisirwin.ca
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/attachments/20220424/73fca068/attachment.htm>