2024 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, at least for my boyfriend. He's running Windows 7 right now, so I'll be switching him to Ubuntu in a few days. Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
Power to you, friend. But with current snap store out of the box it's really hard to recommend Ubuntu to anyone. Linux Mint seems such a better choice to newbies.
At the end of the day it's not really a big deal, people should just use whatever feels best.
If you use apt-get you aren't using snaps, you are unaffected.
Snap is a format created by Canonical which has a really funky proprietary back end. The default application store in Ubuntu uses this format and has been plagued with an impersonation problem. Since everyone could submit snaps there was a lot of spyware posing as legit software. My main gripe was when the snap store just decided to unilaterally close and update my Firefox while I was using it.
Linux Mint does NOT have snaps and even had a debian based version. Pretty neat