"Canonical only having snap releases was harmful to adoption. I liked using lxd, but uninstalled snapd (forgetting lxd used it), and my vms obviously stopped. Snap wouldn't reinstall properly (various inscrutable errors), so I moved it all over to libvirt. I'd still be happily using lxd if it weren't for Canonical's snap-pushing. That's my anecdote of one."
-mkj
(I'm not mkj so..., but I think most users are quite against enforcement of snapd)
It still has the most software support for causal users if you don't want to go the Arch route and trust the AUR. But I think this will change with the rise of Immutable Distros, that will become the standard for people who just want a stable system that works + Flatpaks.
It still has the most software support for causal users if you don’t want to go the Arch route and trust the AUR.
What software do you think casuals use these days? The casual home user wants Chrome and literally nothing more. That's how they can consume YouTube, Spotify, pirate movie streams, and web games. In the last 20 or so years the average PC user has been gradually become more and more computer illiterate. If you are a PC gamer who actually installs games to the hard drive, you're way above the average already.
Forcing Snaps, and requiring all official Ubuntu flavors to remove Flatpak support out of the box. You can still install Flatpak support afterwards, but it continues to rub the Linux community the wrong way.
They want Ubuntu users to use snap, which unsurprisingly isn't very popular.
One of the main arguments for picking Ubuntu over Debian was the installation process, but Debian made the installation process much easier, by allowing non-free firmware.
Ubuntu got worse, and Debian got better, anyone unhappy with Ubuntu should just switch to Debian with Gnome and the problem is largely solved.
I removed the snap version of firefox as soon as snap started whining it couldn't update because I was using firefox.
And it even seems to start a little faster now that it's installed through a ppa.
How Canonical seems to keep doubling down on snaps despite large push back from the community reminds me of Reddit's API change. I didn't see an end in sight, which is what pushed me to Fedora.