I wonder if it is finally time for me to give Arch a try. It's a shame that all my lab's machines run Ubuntu; although I find it solid, this sort of controlling behavior by Canonical seems against the spirit of FOSS.
Or for that matter, regular old Debian probably has 99% of what you need.
The only thing to watch for is testing isn't covered by the Debian security team, so you need to pay attention to security advisories and make a call to keep or uninstall if a package you use has a security issue, as testing often doesn't get security fixes until a week or so after stable does.
There's a reason Arch is so famous and a meme: installation is a challenging weekend project if you've never done it, but it's the most stable distribution with the sanest ecosystem (AUR, sane defaults like systemd, fastest package manager, rolling releases, packages are kept as close to upstream as possible).
Once you go Arch you probably won't go back and you will just grow the meme further.
Can't you simply opt out of using snaps and keep using .deb with Ubuntu, no matter what Canonical is pushing as their preferred distribution?
- The hassle you have to do to install "non-free" software.
- It's basically RHEL unstable: plenty of opinionated, bleeding-edge software choices that are either unsupported [1] or very much undocumented, unless you can find some help on the actual RHEL guides.
- COPR (user packages) is worse than Ubuntu's PPA, both of which are much worse than Arch Linux's AUR.
1: Running Docker on Fedora 32 is non trivial because of how firewalld is configured and because Fedora decided to go all in on nftables. Sure, it's the future, but Docker hasn't got the memo yet. Nor the memo about cgroups2.
Say what you want, systemd is here to stay. Everybody's free to make a distro without it, but I wouldn't consider it for a full time workstation, at all.