Just disable snapd after you have achieved your ideal configuration. But yes, this should be a setting somewhere...

The problem with that is you are fighting the platform. That's not a great place to be. Unless your disagreement with the platform's design is small enough you are likely to be better choosing a more appropriate platform.

I'm currently on Kubuntu 19.10. I don't have any snaps. So they can't autoupdate. BTW: After installation of Kubuntu there were automatic security updates. But it was possible to turn these off in the Muon Package Manager (Settings | Software Sources | Updates | Automatic Updates)

Thanks, that's helpful.

Another huge differentiator for Ubuntu over Windows was that I didn't think the OS vendor was trying to seize control of my computer. Canonical jeopardized that trust with this choice. I truly hope they take steps to restore it. I don't want the added work of switching OSs.

I tried to uninstall snapd on 18.04 and it broke the desktop.

I tried to disable it from systemd, but it had some weird way of relaunching itself.

just do a web search on disabling snapd to see how many people want to do this.

PopOS is probably the closest... unless they pull the feature from 2020 into their main branch.