QE School: Firefox causing various issues on Macs

[elinscott]

Various mac users reported issues with firefox during the first hands-on. The most dramatic of these was when launching jupyter-lab seemed to cause some sort of kernel corruption, the machine entered terminal mode, and froze.

The solution to all of these issues seemed to be uninstalling firefox and relying on chromium instead.

I have asked those who encountered problems to add more specifics below.

[mbercx]

Seems Firefox from snap can potentially cause the VM to even fail to boot with a segfault on ARM64, related to

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/2098861

At least one student was having segfault issues on boot that were apparently resolved by uninstalling Firefox.

Firefox ships with the Ubuntu image by default it seems, so if we decide to drop it (perhaps only for the ARM version) we'll need to add an explicit step to uninstall it.

[elinscott]

Also note that chemiscope only worked in firefox and not chromium 🤦

[mbercx]

Also note that chemiscope only worked in firefox and not chromium 🤦

Haha, you're kidding? Man, catch-22. 😅

As I mentioned, I think having something that just runs the Jupyter server in a VM or container and then connecting to it via your host's browser is probably a better approach if everything for a tutorial can be executed in such an environment.