Ah that’s good. Disk space isn’t an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.

Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu… that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying “commercial support” basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.

I don’t know if I’ve ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?

I’m not sure about other distros, I’ve just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn’t have a direct installer.

That’s what I was thinking too… If they’re running Ubuntu then they’re probably installing packages through snaps, and that’s always been the worst experience for me. Those apps lag down my whole system, crash or lock up, and generally are unusable. I run Debian but have run into apps that wanted me to use a snap install. One package I managed to find a direct installer that is rock-solid in comparison to the snap version, and the rest of the programs I abandoned.

Firefox (since it was mentioned) is one of those things I believe Ubuntu installs as a snap, despite there being a perfectly usable .deb package. I applaud the effort behind snap and others to make a universal installation system, but it is so not there yet and shouldn’t be the default of any distro.