While my experience thus far with Kubuntu 22.04 has been positive, I did find a minor issue with touchpad scrolling in (non-Snap) Firefox. While moving my two fingers across the touchpad smoothly, which is supposed to make the page on screen scroll smoothly, it would move in short bursts, like I was scrolling a mouse wheel one click at a time. I found that the solution is to run Firefox with the environment variable MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 set to 1.
You can do this in several ways. You can edit the .desktop entry for Firefox and simply put this string in front of the word “firefox” (with a space in between the 1 and the f of firefox):
MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1
If you use any other Mozilla-related products, like Thunderbird or Waterfox, that variable should be useful there too.
It should also work to put the environment variable in .profile in the user’s home folder or in /etc/environment to work globally. That would affect all Mozilla products at once, which is probably a desirable thing… just be aware that this is what it would do.
As for the installation of Firefox itself, I initially used the Mozilla Team PPA release from Ubuntu, but it lacks the KDE Plasma integration that the OpenSUSE version has. Since I use Plasma, I tried downloading the .rpm for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, then used the ‘alien’ utility to convert it to .deb format. To do this, simply install ‘alien’ from the Ubuntu repo, then navigate to where the .rpm has been downloaded, and enter:
sudo alien --scripts mozillafirefox.rpm
where ‘mozillafirefox.rpm’ is modified to reflect the actual filename. It will spit a bunch of stuff on screen, but don’t worry about that… when it is done, it will create a .deb file in the same folder as the .rpm, and you can install that .deb like any other.
I also installed the converted .rpm for kmozillahelper from OpenSUSE 15.3 (same command line, just the different filename again). The one from Tumbleweed didn’t work in my case.With Jammy, the converted OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Firefox worked right out of the box, no adjustments needed. Note that it will install it in /usr/lib64/firefox instead of the normal Ubuntu location of /usr/lib/firefox.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
