Jammy, don’t snap at me!

The current Ubuntu LTS release, 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish”, does not install a Debian package for Mozilla Firefox anymore. Instead, Ubuntu now delivers Firefox as a snap. I’m not particularly enthralled by that idea.

Every once in a while I look at the current state of snaps. And every time I look them, I find that they don’t solve any problems I am having at the time, but do add some. The same, incidentally, happens to be true for Wayland, which is why I still use X.org. (I want to emphasize that the foregoing is true for me — your own experience may well differ, and that’s perfectly okay.) So I have kept my systems free of snapd, and I intend to keep them that way for the foreseeable future.

However, if you upgrade an existing Ubuntu Focal or Impish system to Jammy in-place, with the customary apt dist-upgrade command, Ubuntu replaces the pre-existing Debian (.deb) package with a snap. That is to say, firefox in Ubuntu Jammy is a transitional package that would install snapd as a dependency, and then run snap install firefox. Mid-upgrade, it does pause and prompt you about this fact — but there’s no yes or no that would give you the option to bail, only an “OK” button.

What you thus want to do if you’re wired like me, prior to commencing your upgrade, is tell Ubuntu that you want to keep installing Firefox from a package. And while you’re at it, you might also politely inform your package manager that you have no desire to use snaps, at all.

To do so, first become root, and make the necessary changes to change the focal or impish references in your /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d files to jammy as you normally would.

Then, make sure that you don’t have the snapd package installed:

# dpkg -l snapd
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version      Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=================================
un  snapd          <none>       <none>       (no description available)

Next, mark the snapd package with hold, so that the current state of the package (un) is made permanent:

apt-mark hold snapd

Now, add the mozillateam PPA:

add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa

Next, create a file named /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox, containing the following three lines:

Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001

At this stage, your system should be set up to (a) not install the snap daemon, and (b) conduct the upgrade of the firefox package using the regular Debian package as it appears in the PPA, not the distro package that is a wrapper around snap install.

Now, proceed with:

apt dist-upgrade

Happy jamming!