Not sure what others are doing to use Ubuntu (23.04) without snaps, but this is what I am doing:
- for Firefox I found a guide here
- for chromium I am actually using the Linux Mint packages (which work absolutely fine), and I have just set up a small repository I can add to apt:
deb [arch=amd64 allow-insecure=yes] http://snapless.cmeerw.net victoria upstream
- this just syncs from Linux Mint and only republishes chromium in the Packages file (with downloads redirected to a Linux Mint mirror). BTW, I am not signing these…
What are others doing?
Oh, you seem to be looking for Debian. https://www.debian.org/
Pop!_OS is “Snapless”. Our Firefox builds come directly from Mozilla in the deb format.
Sure, but what about your chromium builds? (as mentioned in my post, replacing the firefox snap with a firefox deb is easy enough on Ubuntu, chromium is the more difficult one to deal with)
Feels like you don’t want to use Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is going the way of snap-only and it might as well pick an Ubuntu-based GNOME distro. There’s a bunch out there, but PopOS can be pretty easily stripped down to a vanilla GNOME system. You could even just modify Mint and install GNOME on top of that.
How about VanillaOS? That’s an Ubuntu (soon to be debian) based plain GNOME system with support for a range of packaging formats.
You could also go for Manjaro GNOME edition, but not as stable.
Zorin is cool but not as barebones for a GNOME spin.
True. I focussed on the GNOME options for OP but KDE-Neon is a great snapless Ubuntu distro
Switched to Linux Mint. But not because of Snaps but rather RAM usage. Mint is lighter and faster. On cold boot it uses just 745mb versus 1.6GB on Ubuntu Gnome.
I don’t mind Snaps but I also won’t go out of my way to install it because there is no must-have snap that I need.