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I discovered Ubuntu, 2024 edition (no I’m not switching).

Once installed, it comes with Firefox preinstalled, with the icon showing up in the GNOME dock.

There’s a ‘firefox’ .deb package installed, but hey ‘dpkg -L firefox’ shows that it’s almost empty, with little more than /usr/bin/firefox, and — surprise! — ~/.snap/firefox occupies quite a bit of space. Hmm! 🤔

Turns out there’s a “fake” (transitional?) ‘firefox’ .deb:
us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/p

/usr/bin/firefox in that package ends with: exec /snap/bin/firefox "$@".

And ‘debian/firefox.preinst’ basically runs ‘snap install firefox’. QED.
us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/p

I found this quite evil because I thought you could still choose between apt and snap. That’s not quite the case.

Anyway, that Firefox packaged who knows how has all the surveillance things turned on: completions by Google in the location bar before history completion, Google as the default search engine, “telemetry”, and of course no ad blocker or anything by default.

This has a very “Windows feel”.

@civodul That's Ubuntu. A bastardized Debian with commercial spyware shit replacing the high quality upstream.

Cassandrich

@civodul "Windows feel" you cited is the ENTIRE POINT of Ubuntu.