Out of curiosity, do you feel the same way about Flatpak?
Have not tried that. Maybe I should, but im on Debian-style distros for so long (and use 'm on servers and such) that I dont really want to learn the basics again.
Also, from my RPM days I remember essential (pgk mgmt) tools changing way too often for my taste. Also I'm a KDE/Qt kinda person, and the RPM ecosystem was mostly GTK based.
You can install flatpaks on many distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Kubuntu, et cetera.
I have some flatpaks on a Kubuntu laptop I maintain for a family member and installation was about as smooth as it is on my own fedora machine.
I use cli exclusively though so ymmv if you prefer gui(Edit: Exclusively use CLI for sysadmin).
On that note, what requirements pushed Ubuntu to select snap over flatpack?
Snaps evolved from click packages that were developed for the Ubuntu phone. The design dates back to 2013: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-May/0370...
Flatpaks, according to Wikipedia, were first released in 2015. I don't about the current situation, but initially a bunch of features that are considered necessary for snaps were out of scope of the Flatpak project, such as IoT support.
So it wasn't so much that Ubuntu selected snaps over Flatpak. Flatpaks came along later, and Ubuntu had already invested considerable resources developing snaps.
Well for one they control it. But a good advantage that it has over flatpak is that flatpak cannot run on servers while Snap can, though it doesn't sound like it's enabled for servers in this release?
Just my guess work, but I think they are afraid that THE ONE AND ONLY compatible Linux package format will be owned by RedHat. And that "auto updating" packages in that format will usually roll through RH's servers/repos. They want to be in on the action when a standard emerges and therefor push very hard for it, ship a crap product and experience backlash.
It makes my system less predictable, increases load times, makes UI stuff look ugly, obfuscates process monitoring, hogs memory, cannot deal with files in /tmp (and I happen to use /tmp a lot), makes if hard to do audio (like connecting a mic to Chromium)... I can go on.
But in 2019 versions of buntu it could still be removed:
https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup#remove-snap
I found a way to use Debian packages reliably on buntus with a trick that is shown here for Chromium:
https://github.com/cies/kubuntu-setup/tree/master/chrome
If this snap thing continues to invade the *buntus I will move away from them. For now I still like the combination of stable + up-to-date + familiar (Debian based), but --as others have said-- the snap thing goes against why I choose to use open source.