Their insistence on Snap over Flatpak is just confusing the ecosystem, not helping it. I get it's a lock-in thing for them (Snap is locked to Canonical's proprietary store and only allows Ubuntu runtimes) but that's a harmful thing to do.
I get what they're going for - a way to ship self-contained (usually end-user-facing) applications with any dependencies they need without any risk of breaking other applications in the system. Unfortunately, it just results in breaking those applications specifically instead, in weird and stupid ways that are difficult to debug.
I think if snaps did the Flatpak thing - extract to a local directory instead of living on squashfs forever, or even storing them as an uncompressed disk image instead of squashfs - it might be more reasonable, but at that point you may as well just use Flatpaks like everyone else wants.
[0] - Add the following to `/etc/apt/preferences.d/no-ubuntu-firefox`:
Package: firefox
Pin: release l=Ubuntu
Pin-Priority: -1
This will make any `firefox` package from any repository with the `Ubuntu` label (i.e. an official Ubuntu repository) have a -1 priority, or 'never install ever'.
Trust is so hard won and so easily lost. If I can't trust `apt install firefox` to do what it says on the tin, how can I trust anything else in the repository? Maybe next year Canonical decides to replace systemd with one that includes includes freemium access to helpful AI services from Canonical?
But many people will never pay for Linux and it's even causing people to move away (eg to Mint which removes snap)
Perhaps it makes sense in the enterprise market though. They're always trying to push launchpad to us at work and I'm sure this will integrate with snap. But launchpad doesn't work for us because it only works with Ubuntu. So it's just a non starter for us, we have more distros to support. Sure Ubuntu is the biggest in our environment but we want a single pane of glass for everything. More similarities between distros would make that a lot easier.
That, and in case of snap, is to create artifical market share for their proprietary and paid solutions by preinstalling it on the free version.
I'm not a Debian expert, but isn't apt used for this ?
Similarly to rust coreutils, fake sudo and the likes that they push.