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<slightly-off-topic-but-relevant-rant> Recently started using an RPM-based OS as my daily driver (previously Debian->Gentoo->macOS, never ever used anything RP
by lucideer 5y ago
<slightly-off-topic-but-relevant-rant>
Recently started using an RPM-based OS as my daily driver (previously Debian->Gentoo->macOS, never ever used anything RPM-based before). I'm mainly terminal-based, so the number of GUI apps I installed is pretty small: FirefoxDevEdition (my main browser), Chrome (needed for cross-browser testing as a web-dev), Slack, Telegram, VSCode. Only one of those posed a problem. The open-source one. The irony of this is pretty embarrassing.
A LOT of this can be put down to the fragmentation of Linux OS package management, and the package repos maintained by individual OSes, but the entire experience has been so bad with Firefox in many ways that can't really be blamed on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL folk, or on the broader Linux community in general.
- Not only do Mozilla not provide any 3rd-party yum repo, they don't even provide RPMs.
- The built-in Firefox updater UI dropdown (with the upgrade now button) triggers but doesn't seem to have considered Linux at all: it's just a no-op. It would be nice if the updater actually worked in Linux (as Chrome's does), but if it's a no-op the UI should at least not be misleading/confusing.
- The updater CLI is largely undocumented, it doesn't autodownload new versions (you must handle that yourself) and it doesn't gracefully handle killing/restarting running processes.
- There is no programmatic way to shutdown the Firefox process gracefully via the Linux cli anyway...
- Firefox puts its user data in "$HOME/.mozilla" instead of being XDG compliant.
If that's Firefox's level of support for what is (surely?) the 2nd biggest Linux packaging format, I wonder what the Manjaro/Pacman experience is like. I get that Arch's systems are generally much simpler, so it might be much better, but still...
- lbhdc 5y agoI am not sure what Mozillas involvement in creating any of these RPMs, but there are a number of RPMs available for firefox[0]. I am running fedora, and firefox is in the default repos. [0] https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=firefox https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=firefox
- lucideer 5y agoJust referring to DevEdition here. The mainline Firefox is the default on a few RPM distros, so definitely is included in repos (That said a few of my bullet-points still apply to mainline, particularly around updaters & XDG). One could definitely argue that this is an edge-case, but... then one wonders who the typical DevEdition user being targetted is.