After upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04.1 Firefox does not start in my system.
I was suggested to adress the question in this forum.
Here what happens when I try to start Firefox from terminal:
This is a known issue and it’s Snap’s fault; if your home directory is not the same as $HOME, or involves a symbolic link or anything else accept the most basic cases.
The only fix is to move your home directory to conform to Snap’s restricted view of the world, or remove the Ubuntu Firefox snap and go back to installing the binary direct from Mozilla.
apparmor (which is a kernel feature snap packages use to protect file access) does though …
@Renato can you paste the full output (all lines) the command snap version returns ? also … if you paste something in this forum, please make sure to add three backticks ``` above and below the pasted text, that way the formatting will not get lost and we can read it a lot easier …
can you point to the place where i claim that ? i’m just pointing out that this is not a snap problem but that issues with uncommon home dirs are a problem with one of the underlying security mechanisms it uses … this “problem” is way way older than snap packages even exist:
PS: note that the above log (as hard to read as it is) does not even seem to point to a snap issue at all but is possibly just an actual permission issue with the home dir (or a readonly disk issue with the partition the home dir lives on) … but there is not enough information yet to judge what exactly the error is, which is why we did ask for more info …
it would need massive changes in the kernels security layer … there is not much snapd can actually do about it because it is only a consumer of the kernel feature …
Regardless, when many people report the same problem with an OS update, it would beg the question “what did they do that makes a significant number of users suddenly unable to use one or more programs?” When you can easily find instructions on how to bypass the snap version, and use the deb version without any problems, what would you say that says about the “improvements”?
I’m not really sure what you want to discuss with me here.
someone made a very generalized statement about “permission denied” in the home dir being “a known issue” and being “snaps fault” (and then pointing to an appramor limitation in that post) … neither is true and the debugging and fixing in this thread showed this …
all i did was pointing to the correct place the aforementioned limitation comes from, which triggered you to attack me for “implying it would be a rare problem with firefox” … which is again nothing i did do at all (but if this came across anywhere between my lines, i do apologize, this was not intended).
the problem has been fixed, it was not related to snaps or firefox at all but caused by broken permissions of the OPs home dir in general.
is there any reason to keep this thread alive for anything ?
I didn’t mean any disrespect, and I apologize if it came across that way. I was most definitely NOT attacking you. All I’m saying is that the program is broken, and although you posted a potential fix, people report that fix as not working. No discussion, just what I meant to be a thoughtful comment. Based on the speed of your replies, I’m guessing that you may work for Canonical. While I think they have had a consistently good product, in this instance, my personal belief is that they’ve dropped the ball. And, looking at the fact that there are posts going back to April reporting the same problem, they don’t appear to be interested in issuing a patch to fix it. Having to go looking for a fix for a commonly used program, after a major update to an operating system, is just not acceptable.
i’m still not sure what you are talking about, the issue in question has been fixed by fixing the missing write permission in the OPs home …
i doubt anyone has posted a problem with lost write permissions “back since april” …
if you are actually talking about something not related to this thread, pretty please start a new one with a proper title and description (they are free ).
i do have a hard time understanding what you refer to and you seem to be mixing several issues/points …
if you want to discuss firefox being a snap in general, there are two or three threads on discourse.ubuntu.com already discussing limitations, workarounds, bugs and solutions … and the FF maintainers read along over there.