Unless you rely on systemd, try Void Linux. It has a sane package manager and a very active, friendly community. It requires a little legwork to get to the same polish as Ubuntu and other consumer-oriented distros, but it is rock solid and reliable.

Otherwise be careful with Manjaro; it is a noble project with great goals and some great implementations (and a stellar community!), but they tend to go a bit overboard on customization for customization's sake which has introduced breakage in the past. Nothing that isn't fixed within a day in my experience, but stable it most certainly is not.

There's also Mint for a more traditional and conservative take on Ubuntu's method, as well as MX Linux which shows off how good Debian can be in the right hands.

Or go crazy like me and start using OpenBSD as your main workstation provided your workflow can adapt to it; I'm on 7.0 on this machine with Firefox 95 and literally everything I need is here.

I'd like to throw my two cents in on Devuan. This is a fork of Debian that simply doesn't include systemd, but does include all the other work that Debian has done, and tracks all the Debian releases.

This is my daily driver for both home and work. I've completely ditched Windows and other versions of Linux. Steam runs fine, and with Proton, I have compatibility good enough not to miss Windows at all. Some games (Dark Messiah is one) that won't even run in Windows anymore run great in Proton.

The company I work for does a lot of container-based work, and aside from a couple tweaks to apt sources that naively assume release names, everything "just works".

I recently upgraded to 21.10, where in the process, snap was reinstalled and firefox was reinstalled as a snap. I did however just purge snap as I've done many times before, without any issue. Then installed firefox through flatpak, which is as of writing version 98.0.2, which looks to be the same as you get through snap.

So, in conclusion, it shouldn't matter one bit how canonical decides to distribute firefox, if you can just use the debian based apt, or flatpak.

I hope canonical goes away from the snap model, because I've had nothing but issues with it, until I got fed up enough to remove it, and then everything was great again. Issues were mostly related to read-only mounted file system, and otherwise the mess it produces. However, even if I had experienced none of those, the whole automatic updates whether-you-like-it-or-not... is one of the reasons why I'm not using windows or macOS.

You can just manually install the official Firefox linux release. I've always done this since the Debian Iceweasel days and it works without issue.

What does it mean functionally to move it to snap exclusively? Removing it and maybe some of its dependencies from ubuntus default apt repositories? Would there be issues building it and providing it in a custom ppa?