Canonical provides transitional packages for packages that they’ve decided to provide as snaps. They’re not forcing anyone to use snaps, they’re saying “if you want the default we provide you, we’re providing you with a snap.” KDE Neon (my current distro, which is downstream of Ubuntu) has decided that they want to use the deb packages from packages.mozilla.org, so they provide an override. If you want to use the deb from packages.mozilla.org, you could grab KDE Neon’s repository deb and install that, or just set up the mozilla repository and use the same pin file they already have.

This is like saying “Debian FORCES you to use libav” Debian moved from ffmpeg to libav for a while. No, they provided libav and made transitional packages for this drop-in replacement. Some people didn’t like that and made their own ffmpeg repos, and the process for using their separate ffmpeg rather than Debian’s transitional packages was the same as the process for using Firefox from a different repository. (I was one of the people used some third-party ffmpeg repositories, and I was glad when they switched back to ffmpeg and provided libav to ffmpeg transitional packages.)

Does the fact that the Ubuntu repositories don’t contain Keysmith mean “Ubuntu PROHIBITS you from using Keysmith?”

Because people who just want their daily Two Minutes’ Hate rather than actually having nuanced takes.

While Canonical’s particular snap store implementation is closed source, all of the client software as well as the store API are open, and snap isn’t even tied to using snaps from their store. One could easily make a client app that treats snapd much the way apt treats dpkg. (In fact given apt-rpm I think it would probably be feasible to quite literally use apt for that.)

KDE seems to upload their packages to the snap store for Neon, judging from their page.

KDE also maintains most of the flathub.org packages for KDE apps. Not sure what the point is here.

canonical are not the ones doing the maintenance for those apt packages. the debian team does that.

This is wrong in two ways. First, Canonical are the primary employers of a lot of Debian developers, including to do Debian maintenance or development. This includes at least one of the primary developers of apt. Canonical also upstreams a lot of their work to Debian. Second, of the three (!) whole packages that Canonical decided to make transitional packages to the snap, none were coming from upstream Debian. Firefox was being packaged by Mozilla (and Mozilla were the ones who decided to move it to the snap), Thunderbird’s package had been something Canonical was packaging themselves due to the Debian/Mozilla trademark dispute that they never moved back to syncing from Debian due to technical issues with the port, and Chromium was, at least at the time, remaining frozen at old versions in a way that was unacceptable to Ubuntu users.

These are two incredibly persistent pieces of misinformation…

1. Canonical provides snaps for Ubuntu. This is no more “forcing” you to use snaps than they force you to use debs, or than Fedora forces you to use flatpaks/rpms.
2. Apt doesn’t “prefer snaps” by any means. Canonical provides transitional packages for certain packages that got migrated from debs to snaps, but the steps for using another apt repository to replace one of these transitional packages are the same as the steps for replacing any other package provided in your base repos with one from a different repository: You add the other repository, and you tell apt to prefer that repository for the specific packages.

They’re not forced to do so. You can install snaps locally (or provide a distribution system that treats snapd much the way apt treats dpkg), or you can point snapd at a different store. The snap store API is open and documented, and for a while there was even a separate snap store project. It seems to have died out because despite people’s contention about Canonical’s snap store, they didn’t actually actually want to run their own snap stores.

I don’t understand how a transitional package that installs the snap (which is documented in the package description) is any different from a transitional package that replaces, say, ffmpeg with libav.

$ apt show firefox
Package: firefox
Version: 1:1snap1-0ubuntu5
Priority: optional
Section: web
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Mozilla Team <[email protected]>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 124 kB
Provides: gnome-www-browser, iceweasel, www-browser, x-www-browser
Pre-Depends: debconf, snapd (>= 2.54)
Depends: debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0
Breaks: firefox-dbg (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-dev (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-geckodriver (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-mozsymbols (<< 1:1snap1)
Replaces: firefox-dbg (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-dev (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-geckodriver (<< 1:1snap1), firefox-mozsymbols (<< 1:1snap1)
Task: ubuntu-desktop-minimal, ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-full, xubuntu-desktop, lubuntu-desktop, ubuntustudio-desktop, ubuntukylin-desktop, ubuntukylin-desktop, ubuntukylin-desktop-minimal, ubuntu-mate-core, ubuntu-mate-desktop, ubuntu-budgie-desktop-minimal, ubuntu-budgie-desktop, ubuntu-budgie-desktop-raspi, ubuntu-unity-live, edubuntu-desktop-gnome-minimal, edubuntu-desktop-gnome, edubuntu-desktop-gnome-raspi, ubuntucinnamon-desktop-minimal, ubuntucinnamon-desktop
Download-Size: 77.3 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: no
APT-Sources: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble/main amd64 Packages
Description: Transitional package - firefox -> firefox snap
 This is a transitional dummy package. It can safely be removed.
 .
 firefox is now replaced by the firefox snap.

Isn’t that kinda the same with, for example, Fedora and Flatpaks? Or Debian and debs? Or Ubuntu and debs? Or Fedora and rpms?

The packaging system that your distro provides gets you the packages you get. For a small number of packages that were a maintenance nightmare, Ubuntu provides a transitional debs to move people over to the snaps (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird), but if you want to get it from another repo, you can do exactly what KDE Neon does by setting your preferences.

The main problem is Excel, TBH. Far too much stuff depends on Windows-only features of Excel (e.g. macros using COM objects).

I’ve given more details elsewhere, but the short version:

We can classify US presidential votes into three categories:

1. Vote for the Democrat
2. Vote for the Republican
3. Vote third-party/independent or don’t vote

The most effective vote to make on an anti-genocide platform is #1.

Voting for a Republican is voting for a party that appears to be profoundly okay with the genocide in Gaza AND wants to start some genocides of their own (e.g. against trans folks, immigrants and racial minorities). This is the most pro-genocide vote.

Voting for a Democrat is voting for a party that has a fairly significant group that opposes the genocide, and which appears to be movable on the topic.

Any other vote is roughly equivalent to not voting. On the presidental front, there is no chance in this election that anyone other than a candidate from one of the main two parties is elected, and that’s also true for most senate or house races. (Possibly all, but I don’t want to make that strong claim since I haven’t actually researched all the races.) Voting for a candidate who you know won’t win is explicitly choosing not to have a say between the tho feasible candidates.

I do have one caveat though…

If you live in West Virginia for example, it’s a bit more complex. There your choice is essentially “the Republican or not the Republican,” so third-party/independent moves into category 1. However, then I’d argue that voting for the Democrat for president may still be the preferable response because if the Republican wins the electoral college but, (as has happened in every presidential election since 1990 except 2004) the Democrat still wins the popular vote, it further delegitimises the Republican’s presidency and the electoral college.

Agreed, but while we’re working on that in multiple avenues, we still need to vote for the harm reduction choice.

The US green party is essentially an astroturf movement to prevent people from even going as “left” as the Democrats. The Tea Party is there to move Republicans to fascism. The Greens have been co-opted to lubricate that process for them.

Snap is far more like nix. Flatpak deals with a limited subset of what nix and snap do (e.g. it can’t distribute kernel packages).

While snap is certainly not without its problems, people repeatedly make massive negative claims about it that, while often based on a core of truth, are highly embellished to the point of being misinformation. (This is the same tactic I see with bad-faith political trolls, and with a similar result really - they’ll consistently try to use that core of truth to make far stronger claims than are defensible and, when it’s pointed out to them, they move the goalposts to a smaller, more defensible claim, only to repeat the bigger, debunked, claim later.)

To be fair MS Office fully working on Linux is about the only thing we really need to make it completely viable for businesses.