Firefox Not Updating Because snapd not present

Question

System Information:

Ubuntu 22.04

I just upgraded my Ubuntu to 22.04 a few days ago. A few months back I had uninstalled all snap related packages, including snapd because I had read on some online sources that snap packages may lead to a system slowdown. Moreover, they went against the spirit of open source. So enthusiastically I removed them. Thereafter, I had to reinstall the required packages, including Firefox, using apt. No issue in that.

After the upgrade, whenever I run

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

I get the following output:

The following packages have been kept back:
  firefox libomp-dev
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.

I searched a bit online, and found that installing the said packages can resolve this issue.This method resolved the problem with libomp-dev, but not firefox. When I ran:

sudo apt install firefox

I got:

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 firefox : PreDepends: snapd but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I thought that if it is showing that my packages are broken, then

sudo apt --fix-broken install

might help but to no avail.

So does this mean that I can no longer update my Firefox without reinstalling Snap or snapd?

You are not forced to reinstall snapd but you need to add a PPA to update firefox. — Lorenz Keel, May 01 '22 at 12:29
Does this answer your question? How to install Firefox as a traditional deb package (without snap) in Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy) — Lorenz Keel, May 01 '22 at 12:29
"I had read on some online sources that snap packages may lead to a system slowdown" -- your online sources were misleading you. If you can reproduce snap runtime behavior that slows your whole system, the snap developers would love to see a bug report from you so they can reproduce it. Because right now their daily testing doesn't show any system slowdown at all. — user535733, May 01 '22 at 13:28
It appears that you may still have the snap version of firefox installed, since it depends on snapd. See answers to this question for guidance as to how to install the non-snap version. https://askubuntu.com/q/1399383/243321 — Organic Marble, May 01 '22 at 13:52

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered May 01 '22 at 12:29

7

Firefox is no longer part of Canonical's apt repositories, as the goal is to have people using the Snap version to ensure security updates are rolled out in a timely manner. That said, if you would like to continue using a version of Firefox installed via a .deb package, you can get it directly from Mozilla.

Here's how:

Open Terminal (if it's not already open)
Remove the currently-installed version of Firefox

Add Mozilla's PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa

Update apt:
```
sudo apt update 
```
Install Firefox:
```
sudo apt install firefox
```

So long as you do not have Snap installed, this will do what you're looking for without any additional steps

answered May 01 '22 at 12:29

matigo

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Please take a look here, you'll need to configure apt preferences and unattended upgrades to prevent reinstallation of the snap package. – mook765 May 01 '22 at 13:08
@mook765 is that still required if Snap is not installed on the system? – matigo May 01 '22 at 13:14
Yes, it is required, you need to tell apt from which repository you want to install or upgrade firefox. – mook765 May 01 '22 at 13:33
Yeah, it was required. Otherwise, the system was not linking my firefox application to the ppa repository I added. It would be helpful for future references if you could add @mook765 's part to your answer. – Aman Kumar May 01 '22 at 15:12

Firefox Not Updating Because snapd not present

1 Answers1