This is a problem the package maintainers and the distros have brought on themselves!

They put countless hours into stitching roadkill into a complex quilt and then scoff at users who complain on the rotting stench.

They split packages from the creators into multiple pieces to meet their own idiosyncratic aesthetics. Firefox and other pieces of complex software should reside entirely in its own hierarchy. I have been using Linux and FreeBSD since 1997, SunOS and OSF/1 before that, this is good as it gets folks.

The only hope is Nix, OSX, Qubes and folks that care about progress. Everyone else is building ships in bottles.

But their 'idiosyncratic aesthetic' helps navigating. In the mozilla world, they know their aesthetics ('not invented here'), because its their everyday job and can always work hands on and naturally can be faster. While in the distribution world, where a lot of software comes together, its good that i can find everything in common/familiar places.

Not easy to find a good middle ground and still supporting progress.

/Applications/Fiefox.app. Not that hard and not unfamiliar, really. (Not saying Linux distorts should adopt /Applications. My point is it’s not hard to have a consistent and self-contained experience, and AFAIK there are several competing bundle formats on Linux already.)

Awesome. I’d add smartOS to that list. ++Qubes.

Although as far as package management in Qubes you’re still stuck with dnf and apt. But they’re pushing progress in other ways. (Are you able to run nix on qubes?)

i feel i could relate to another post on homepage today

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022466

but you can just use Mozilla's official binary packages, which are tested to work with a specific set of libraries, and I think are built with higher optimization levels (O3/pgo) than what distros conservatively do (O2) because of cargo-culting early-2000 gentoo forums (that was the case a few years ago, not 100% sure it is still the case today as I could not find easily the current release flags).

Mozilla doesn't provide binary packages for all architectures and OSs supported by Nix/NixOS

Maintainers also sometimes need to patch software to conform to their distribution's norm. For example, Debian patches it to accept extensions installed with APT.

And I'm glad distribution maintainers always recompile software themselves, it helps making sure:

1. binaries are really made from the open source code (I know, it's not bullet-proof)

2. it's actually humanly possible to actually compile it from source (my pet peeve in this area is Kafka: it's used everywhere, but no one seems to know how to actually fully compile it from sources anymore)

I fully agree. It should be said that nixpkgs also provides the firefox-bin derivation, which is just want the grandparent suggested. But there is a lot of value in checking that software builds are actually reproducible from the sources.

> Kafka

Name checks out...

This sounds like ”move fast and break things” writ large, and a salutary lesson in the flaws of this approach.