Why is Software in Qubes Old and How do I Upgrade It?

User Support
1

Hello, I have been daily driving Qubes OS for few days now, and I love it. But I have few issues.

Firefox:
Qubes OS has pre-installed Firefox on version 78.15.0. Firefox 96 is the newest one.
Some of my extensions doesn’t work at old version of Firefox. Also, my Firefox is slow and sometimes freezes.

Snap:
Then I would like to install programs on Debian 10 template with snaps. It works, I read some guild on Qubes Os website, but I can’t install some programs because:

error: cannot perform the following tasks:
- Mount snap "signal-desktop" (379) (snap "signal-desktop" assumes unsupported features: snapd2.43 (try to update snapd and refresh the core snap))

Telegram:
I installed Telegram with snap, it works, but I can’t log in “internal server error” I would be grateful if I could fix it.

Otherwise, I love using Qubes OS and if I would be able to fix it, it would be awesome.
Thank you for help!

2

Hi @JojoYou, I’m glad you like Qubes! It seems that all your problems are not directly connected with Qubes but with the operating systems which you run inside it. Debian is famous for its old software. Debian 10 is already oldstable, it’s recommended to download new Debian-11 template. Your problem with Snap should probably be also solved by this (if not, ask). Also, Fedora should be replaced, too.

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8 posts were split to a new topic: Qubes Won’t Recognize Keyboard After Restart

4

Also, make sure to update your templates before you try to use them.

5

By the way the Debian 11 template comes with Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) instead of regular Firefox, so it will be a few versions behind the regular version (but it still gets security updates): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar

The fedora templates on the other hand come with regular Firefox instead of Firefox ESR.

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Follow the commands on their site or like my post. You can use the proxy…
tl:dr

# NOTE: These instructions only work for 64 bit Debian-based
# Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint etc.

# 1. Install our official public software signing key
wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg
cat signal-desktop-keyring.gpg | sudo tee -a /usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg > /dev/null

# 2. Add our repository to your list of repositories
echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg] https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial main' |\
  sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list

# 3. Update your package database and install signal
sudo apt update && sudo apt install signal-desktop

And i just used:
curl --proxy 127.0.0.1:8082 https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg

Instead of:
wget -O-
Hope that helps.