Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Mozilla To Begin Offering Firefox In Snap Format For Ubuntu

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Mozilla To Begin Offering Firefox In Snap Format For Ubuntu

    Phoronix: Mozilla To Begin Offering Firefox In Snap Format For Ubuntu

    With today's release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Snappy package management is being more broadly supported across the Ubuntu ecosystem. This complementary packaging format to Debian packages for Ubuntu will allow third-party applications to be more easily updated. One of the other organizations already on board with using the Snap packaging format is Mozilla...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Great news! Can't wait to see more software packaged this way.

    Comment


    • #3
      I would like to point out that there's lot of applications delivered similar way for xdg-app - I use it for getting Pitivi daily build for example. Anyway, xdg-app and snap is really way forward for development builds AND developers wanting to avoid deb/rpm building process.

      Comment


      • #4
        I'm curious how this will work out. Instead of putting everything under /usr/share, will we have apps that keep their libraries in their own folders now?

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by bug77 View Post
          I'm curious how this will work out. Instead of putting everything under /usr/share, will we have apps that keep their libraries in their own folders now?

          Yes. If something needs GTK 3.20, but Ubuntu 16.04 only has 3.18 it will be bundled with the application. The "hur dur muh disk space" argument never was an issue in case anyone wants to complain about that. People happily install steam which downloads over a freaking Gigabyte of Ubuntu 12.04 Libs for the Steam Runtime so that games work out of the box on all distros with steam.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by bug77 View Post
            I'm curious how this will work out. Instead of putting everything under /usr/share, will we have apps that keep their libraries in their own folders now?
            Do snap packages get unpacked on install or do they execute from the ,snap container? I haven't found an answer to that yet, but Canonical claims that malware packaged with a snap is unable to infect other snaps.... So to me in my mind that sounds like a container....

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by blackout23 View Post


              Yes. If something needs GTK 3.20, but Ubuntu 16.04 only has 3.18 it will be bundled with the application. The "hur dur muh disk space" argument never was an issue in case anyone wants to complain about that. People happily install steam which downloads over a freaking Gigabyte of Ubuntu 12.04 Libs for the Steam Runtime so that games work out of the box on all distros with steam.
              disk space is still valid opinion... for those that stayed in 1990 and only have 40MB HDD some people just refuse to go with progress

              Comment


              • #8
                Disk space isn't really a concern, but security is. I definitely see the benefit of xdg-app (and I guess snap, which I haven't researched before), and I'll probably use it. However, it turns mundane app packagers into managing security updates, which isn't necessarily a good thing. If every application starts shipping their own versions of libraries, then it becomes harder to know if you're effectively patched against a security vulnerability.

                Previously, if an update of openssl is released, all you have to do is update your system, restart any services running the old library (trivial using utilities like `tracer` now, which `dnf` even has a plugin for). Now you'll also need to ensure the snap/xdg-app packagers patch their release, and update their package. This wasn't a concern before.


                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by justmy2cents View Post

                  disk space is still valid opinion... for those that stayed in 1990 and only have 40MB HDD some people just refuse to go with progress
                  My 2-in-1 has a 64GB SSD; I don't use it for much, but I'm a little more concerned with disk space on it than my 2TB desktop.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by blackout23 View Post


                    Yes. If something needs GTK 3.20, but Ubuntu 16.04 only has 3.18 it will be bundled with the application. The "hur dur muh disk space" argument never was an issue in case anyone wants to complain about that. People happily install steam which downloads over a freaking Gigabyte of Ubuntu 12.04 Libs for the Steam Runtime so that games work out of the box on all distros with steam.
                    Well, it's not about disk space, but my Windows installation still has about a dozen C runtimes installed with no way to tell which one is still in use. I'd like Linux to remain clean in this regard.

                    Originally posted by duby229 View Post

                    Do snap packages get unpacked on install or do they execute from the ,snap container? I haven't found an answer to that yet, but Canonical claims that malware packaged with a snap is unable to infect other snaps.... So to me in my mind that sounds like a container....
                    It's essentially a Docker container which is essentially LXC, so...

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X