If you're fighting your distro vendor over the choice of packages they're providing in their repos, then yeah, you should probably use another distro. But that's exactly what I was saying in my original comment above. If you don't like rpms or flatpaks, you shouldn't be using Fedora either, since those two packaging technologies are what Fedora uses for their distribution. For me the Linux Mint developers' hostility to snaps (which in my experience tend to be the best trade-offs for my needs) is one of the many reasons I won't use or suggest Mint.
KDE Neon provides their own packages in their repo that add Mozilla's apt repository for Firefox as well as setting up the preferences. In fact, here's the file, which gets placed in /etc/apt/preferences.d/org-kde-neon-packages-mozilla-org-pin
:
# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-only OR GPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-GPL
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2022 Harald Sitter <sitter@kde.org>
Package: firefox
Pin: release o=packages.mozilla.org
Pin-Priority: 1000
Package: firefox-*
Pin: release o=packages.mozilla.org
Pin-Priority: 1000
Package: firefox-locale-*
Pin: release o=packages.mozilla.org
Pin-Priority: 1000
The great part of KDE Neon's approach to it is that since I do want the Firefox snap on my KDE Neon laptop, I can simply run sudo apt remove neon-repositories-mozilla-firefox firefox && sudo apt update && sudo apt install firefox
to get the snapped version of Firefox.
Also, snapd keeps a snapshot of your per-revision configuration from an app for a while after you remove
it. You can run snap saved
to see all the current snapshots. It doesn't remove your $SNAP_USER_COMMON
directory for that snap (which is where the Firefox snap stores its profiles), so moving from the snapped Firefox to the version from apt is just a matter of moving the .mozilla
directory out of ~/snap/firefox/common
to ~/
I don't use Notepadqq anywhere (I use kate btw), but on my KDE Neon system it's currently showing:
It seems to be a dead project (the last release on GitHub is that same 2.0 beta from 2019), but looking at the snapcraft.yaml file, it looks like it's because they're vendoring in a pretty big chunk of KDE and gtk libraries. 2019 was before I started doing anything with snaps or flatpaks for desktops so I'm not sure what the state of KDE content snaps was then (I know there was a GNOME one because the core18 gnome content snap is installed on my system for uhh... some app that I have), but these days for desktop apps there are content snaps for gnome (published by Canonical) and KDE Frameworks (published by KDE) to deduplicate those dependencies.