How to Change Channels of Snap Installed Package

This maybe surprising for many people, as I don’t like much ubuntu, as you all talk to me on many forums and open source project, you always see me to refer user to fedora, and flatpak.. but for my work now, I’m confined in ubuntu, and snap.. so I tried to just brush it away… anyway any distro, I can work it professionally, but I would rather use Fedora/RHEL with Thinkpad.

So let us back to our case, as the title state, how the heck we can change the installed package of snap app. The command quite simple, we need to check first what channels is available for the installed package in our snap app. For sake of convenience, I use firefox as example, because Ubuntu 22.04 LTS lock the firefox by default to version 103, like ESR but isn’t ESR, it’s Ubuntu standard itself, so to check the channel we are now, we can check using this command:


$ sudo snap info firefox
name: firefox
summary: Mozilla Firefox web browser
publisher: Mozilla✓
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/firefox
contact: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla
license: unset
description: |
Firefox is a powerful, extensible web browser with support for modern web application
technologies.
commands:
- firefox
- firefox.geckodriver
snap-id: 3wdHCAVyZEmYsCMFDE9qt92UV8rC8Wdk
tracking: latest/stable
refresh-date: today at 10:16 WIB
channels:
latest/stable: 116.0.3-2 2023-08-16 (3026) 248MB -
latest/candidate: 117.0-1 2023-08-22 (3055) 249MB -
latest/beta: 117.0b9-1 2023-08-18 (3039) 249MB -
latest/edge: 118.0a1 2023-08-22 (3056) 270MB -
esr/stable: 115.1.0esr-1 2023-08-01 (2954) 253MB -
esr/candidate: 115.2.0esr-1 2023-08-21 (3052) 253MB -
esr/beta: ↑
esr/edge: ↑
installed: 116.0.3-2 (3026) 248MB -


As we can see, there are

tracking:

with latest/stable, it’s because I already change it to latest/stable, as bing.com has problem with some of it’s js using firefox 103 (even the ESR already at 115).

Then how we can change the channel, example we can to change into nightly? It’s simple, we can use refresh option from snap, and providing the channel params, as example :


$ sudo snap refresh firefox --channel latest/edge
***** the update progress will be shown here *****


BEWARE! Snap has problem, we need to close the related app, in order snap could work. So make sure all RELATED app closed first, then we can upgrade it.
I have hard time check this, because it’s not as straight forward as flatpak… I even make a alias for flatpak function in snap (it’s heresy, but I hate snap much… that I need to make a workaround to make it work like flatpak…)

Well, I hope this help others who have hard time asking, why the hell the browser we have on LTS is locked on specific version.. because it’s LTS… but at least RHEL/Clones done better with following the ESR, which ubuntu suck at…

Ciao!