Comment 2 for bug 1970477

Thanks for your help!

On the Lubuntu forum, it *is* happening on real but slow machines. The problem surfaced first when a user was attempting to use the Lubuntu 22.04 live session from a burned DVD. The live session takes ~20 minutes to boot in this scenario, and the original poster noticed that Firefox was gone once the system got booted up. Various different members on the forum have tried to replicate the issue with varying degrees of success (one person with 2008-2010 hardware was able to replicate it to some degree on bare metal with both USB keys and DVDs, while other people with 8th gen Intel i7s weren't able to reproduce it even with DVDs).

I finally managed to do a bare metal test on a Dell Chromebook 3120 (a old, slow, expired Chromebook) but was unable to reproduce the issue there.

What I find interesting is that, even with the very slow boot time induced by a DVD, otherwise fast hardware doesn't show up this problem, while even with the faster boot times provided by a USB key, slow hardware may exhibit this issue.

Another interesting point is that the issue can show up in different ways across different boots on the painfully slow VM. My first boot of Lubuntu in pure QEMU resulted in Firefox vanishing from the system menu entirely. Attempting to start it from a terminal ended up with it telling me it wasn't installed at all. A second boot *from the same ISO* resulted in Firefox appearing. A third boot from the same ISO also ended up with Firefox appearing, but being unable to launch.

The fact that the particular error can vary depending on the boot suggests to me that this might be a race condition, though with the way I'm booting the VM, the boot time might be able to vary widely, which might cause the same problem.