I know that Canonical are set on using snaps for browsers and the like, and many users still do not trust or like using them, so… would it be possible to add a custom repository with alternatives in .deb format for them to use e.g. instead of firefox, maybe librewolf browser and chromium .debs.
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Are you asking for that from Lubuntu? or just if it’s possible?
Ubuntu flavors can use [almost] any packages we want from ‘main’ or ‘universe’, but that doesn’t include custom repositories if we’re to remain an official flavor (at least that’s how I understand it).
For other ISOs to be created (such as a Lubuntu 22.04 LTS using LXQt 1.1 from our backports PPA) they’d be unofficial ISOs, and wouldn’t be downloaded from cdimage.ubuntu.com but hosted elsewhere.
If I recall correctly; early in the LXQt days (cosmic/18.10 or disco/19.04, though I could be wrong with the cycle) we used falkon as our default browser during the development process, but due to some problems, we reverted to including firefox before we actually released. (falkon was very light & fast, but it didn’t handle every web site as well as firefox did; though it has improved since then as I understand it)
chromium has been a snap package in Ubuntu for some time now (since 2019) so if someone was to add one to Ubuntu repositories (eg. ‘universe’ so it could be used) it would need another name.
Also please don’t forget it wasn’t Canonical that suggested firefox be a snap package;
requesting the snap package be used.
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To be official, snapd and firefox/snap must be available in the distro.
So including custom repos would conflict with that.
But this doesn’t mean you can’t change that after you install.
You always have the choice of adding other repos e.g firefox or brave.
Or even remove snap completely.
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First thing I do on a fresh install is remove snaps and install LibreWolf as my main browser, but even running firefox as a snap is very slow on my low spec laptop which is why I installed Lubuntu in the first place.