Every user I know who has left Ubuntu has cited snaps as a push factor. And their only mention of snap in this post is to say that they are fixing a regression from native Chromium? Tone deaf.
I recently gave the new Debian a try on my laptop, and I've been happy with it so far. I've also been pleasantly surprised that it's noticeably snappier than Ubuntu for some reason.
My main machine is still running Ubuntu, but when the time comes to reinstall or upgrade, especially if the snap situation becomes even worse, I will probably switch to Debian entirely.
And yeah, it was because of Snap.
Ubuntu suffers something that effects windows really badly. In an attempt to polish, you obfuscate a lot of moving parts. When one of those parts break down, it becomes far harder to repair.
I also understand the irony of wanting people to switch to Linux then being against a polished distro.
I gave away my gaming computer to a teen whose mainboard broke. I don't miss Windows one bit.
Interestingly, this doesn't show in live mode, only after install.
Ubuntu Snap wasn't the only reason, but one of them.
Honestly, this whole "if it's not a .deb it's a nightmare" mentality is baffling to me.
I went looking around the web to understand why people dislike Snap in the first place. The top reasons cited on Reddit are:
(1) "Controlled by Canonical, not an open format" (This seems to be a mis-explanation of the complaint that the Snap server itself, which Canonical runs, is closed-source. As though a Snap server would be hard to create, it's a simple CRUD webapp) Anyway, this in no way causes problems for the "casual users" I mentioned, so irrelevant (unless the people who claim that closed-source software is invariably hopelessly buggy compared to open-source are right, that is).
(2) "Ubuntu reinvented the wheel, Flatpak was fine" But does that affect the "casual user" in any way? People are still going to package software for Snap. The casual user isn't going to miss a minute of sleep over their packages coming from a store that existed after a perfectly-good store already existed. It's just not top of mind at all.
(3) "Ubuntu did a bad job designing the system. You have to close Snap apps to update them, but the updater doesn't have a friendly UI for killing apps so they can be updated, which just confuses the average user" (This seems valid. Flatpak updates the app in the background and the new container isn't launched until you quit the app and reopen it normally).
(4) "Forced updates" (This is actually a positive for most casual users, who don't want to think about updates, they just want it to happen).
For instance if it works like channels its virtually impossible to charge a percentage like Apple's app store because people will just publish to a free channel, every distro will include the free channel, and users will just ignore the paid channel. Consider the paucity of software on the Mac app store vs the iphone app store.
1B. There will never be an open source Snap store backend because it would both be more work than you imagine and continued work to retain compatibility of both front and back. If you try you will most likely end up with something that sometimes work sometimes fails and takes a full time maintenance. You may as well call it "snap but shittier how I burned 200k figuring out how moats work"
2. The problem isn't merely re-inventing the wheel its reinventing it for no reason and doing it poorly then not integrating it in a fashion that makes it easy on the average user. The casual user of ubuntu may end up end up needing traditional packages, snaps, flatpaks, ppas. If I understand correctly the current state of software management they can easily install both traditional and snap packages but will have to turn to additional cli tools to integrate ppas and flatpaks.
Arch with the AUR enabled provides funny enough an easier and simpler experience.
3.Agreed
4. The is a positive wherein new versions never fuck things up or remove features that users rely on. This doesn't seem to be the current state of play and pinning a version or launching an older version seems to be table stakes for dealing with flawed software.
Putting lxd/lxc in snap also baffles me. Layers upon layers of abstraction and virtualization for no reason. But that's a different story.
1. keeping the store part of it closed. 2. forcing the use of snaps on me.
Those two feel really off to me, like a poison-pill.