Maybe it's better now in some distros. Not sure about other distros, but I don't like Ubuntu's Snap package. Snap packages typically start slower, use more RAM, require sudo privileges to install, and run in an isolated environment only on systems with AppArmour. Snap also tends to slow things some at boot and shutdown. People report issues like theming mismatches, permissions/file-access friction. Firefox theming complaints are a common example. It's almost like running a docker container for each application. Flatpaks seem slightly better, but still a bandaid. Just nobody is going to fix the compatibility problems in Linux.

Ubuntu was getting too good so it had to snap half of its value out of existence.

You can still get firefox as a .deb though.

https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Mozilla has been publishing official Firefox .DEB packages for over 2 years now.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/01/official_mozilla_debi...

No need for any Canonical packages at all -- works fine on Debian; I use them myself.

I think he still considers this to be the case. He was interviewed on Linus tech tips recently. And he bemoaned in passing the terrible application ecosystem on Linux.

It makes sense. Every distribution wants to be in charge of what set of libraries are available on their platform. And they all have their own way to manage software. Developing applications on Linux that can be widely used across distributions is way more complex than it needs to be. I can just ship a binary for windows and macOS. For Linux, you need an rpm and a dpkg and so on.

I use davinci resolve on Linux. The resolve developers only officially support Rocky Linux because anything else is too hard. I use it in Linux mint anyway. The application has no title bar and recording audio doesn’t work properly. Bleh.