Plucky requires Linux circa 2012 (glibc 2.14+) or newer that mostly adheres to the Linux Standard Base (the majority of Linux distributions). However, Plucky is only regularly tested on a couple Debian-based systems.

SELinux

SELinux is unsupported. Plucky may happen to work fine with it, but it may not.

If you want to use Plucky more than you want to use SELinux, you can disable SELinux. If disabling SELinux fills you with fear, you may want to consider that the majority of Linux desktop users worldwide do not use SELinux.

Snaps

Sometimes users ask why Plucky doesn’t block Firefox when installed from the Ubuntu software center, or similar locations.

The answer is that Snaps and Flatpak on Linux aren’t yet supported.

Removing Snaps

The good news is that Snap infrastructure is fairly easy to remove from a system:

On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get purge snap snapd flatpak
sudo apt-get clean
pluck add nhb

Why enable the nhb feature? Because the package manager is ordinarily allowed. But with nhb on, you can use Plucky rules to limit the package manager.

For example, to limit package management activity on an Ubuntu machine to Mondays from 10am to 12pm:

pluck + when M10-12 allow ubuntu.com

Alternatively:

pluck + when M10-12 allow program:/usr/lib/apt/methods/http

Ubuntu 20

Starting with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the default browser is a snap (usually Firefox, but it can be Chromium for some Ubuntu variants). In either case, most Plucky users will want to install a different browser, such as Brave, Chrome (non-snap), Edge, or Vivaldi. Many Plucky users will also want to remove snap infrastructure, as shown above, or use a distribution of Linux such as Linux Mint Arch Linux, or many other distributions that do not use snaps.

For example, to install Brave:

sudo apt install curl

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main"|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install brave-browser

Linux Mint 21.3

Firefox

Plucky’s Firefox support works, but is lagging behind support for Brave, Chromium, Edge, and Vivaldi. See firefox for an explanation. Those on Ubuntu who want to use Firefox may want to install a non-snap version:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa

echo '
Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001
Package: firefox
Pin: version 1:1snap1-0ubuntu2
Pin-Priority: -1
' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox

sudo snap remove firefox

sudo apt install firefox

echo 'Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins:: "LP-PPA-mozillateam:${distro_codename}";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/51unattended-upgrades-firefox

Unsupported distributions

  • Fedora Silverblue
  • nixOS
  • Vanilla OS
  • blendOS
Last updated: 2024-09-16