There's not been much progress since my last post. Other things cluttered my agenda, and ... I also need my sleep lately, so I could not make up for day-time by using night-time.

Snapd

Which brings me to my topic: I installed Firefox Nightly - as a Snap! The route to that was harder than you may think. First of all, Snaps, which I don't love, either, can not be installed on Alpine/postmarketOS. You can install snapd on PureOS Byzantium, but the snapd release in Byzantium/Bullseye is too old to successfully complete snap install --edge firefox.

I then dabbled with Mobian, and after having downloaded the third image and failed to boot it from microSDXC on my Librem 5, I realized that I might just have to flash it to eMMC. So I flashed it to my secondary Librem 5, and ... not only is it delightful (and ships the new release of mobile-config-firefox), but I could finally install not only snapd, but also Firefox Nightly.

This led me to a setback:

FireFox snap no longer reads /usr/lib/firefox for customization - snap - snapcraft.io

Turns out: The snap does not read the customization from where mobile-config-firefox usually puts it. Now, of course, I can just put stuff where the Snap expects it, meaning, "policies stuff" in etc/firefox/policies, and userChrome/userContent somewhere else but ... It will be annoying, annoying enough to come up with a patch to the Makefile, which would be another can of worms I do not necessarily want to deal with.

Alternatives (and good news)

To find out whether I had missed an alternative to the Snap, I joined the Firefox Nightly Matrix room to ask.

Currently, it boils down to compiling it from source

which is apparently less bad then it sounds - to quote Danny Colin:

"You can also pretty easily cross-compile one with the artifact mode (so you don't compile everything because parts of it is done on Mozilla infra)."

But that's not all: There's been some good news on the long standing issue regarding official ARM64/aarch64 (1678342 - Please provide an official linux ARM64 build) - just read comment 14 from (as of writing this post) 2 days ago.

Read you again, hopefully sooner!