In this case, many computers running different linuxs and many users. Tied together with NIS/NFS in a fairly ordinary way. Thus users see the same firefox profile which ever machine they are using. Switching to snap moves the profile, cache etc etc into the snap directory and isolates the firefox from the default profile / cache etc etc.
In our experience simply updating the system for single, multiuser, standalone or networked machines did not automatically pull over the user's profile into the snap directory which required uninstalling firefox, reinstalling it and "snap run firefox" to migrate. Once migrated the profile in the snap and the profile for non-snap machines are separated so as you move from machine to machine users see either one or the other. It's also a pain as an admin to go around fixing this on a per-user rather than per machine basis. I'd add that snap is woefully slow (both package managing and application start up) and that helper programme integration is, shall we say politely, clunky. I get there might be some theoretical advantages to containerisation from some angles but I don't see that the end user gets anything over the firefox ppa. Strikes me this should be a job for something like update-alternatives and that if switching from the snap to apt-get was made this easy you'd see a clear exodus from the snap - even in the single machine/single user environment. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to firefox in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1988665 Title: snap install of firefox is a bad idea on heterogeneous networks Status in firefox package in Ubuntu: Incomplete Bug description: We run a network of linux computers mixing a variety of flavours of ubuntu and other distros - for many reasons they can't all run the same system and they can't all be updated simultaneously. The switch for snap for firefox is a real PITA because the profile is stored elsewhere. So we have people losing their profiles, people ending up with unsynchronised profiles, and a whole lot of annoyance. It looks like snapping a key component such as this hasn't really been thought through beyond the single user / single computer point of view. So the snap of firefox should be reverted back to deb (or an update option with an easy alternative fix offered) and any further conversions of packages to snaps should be consider the heterogeneous network environment (with fixes) before proceeding. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1988665/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
