The transition in Chromium packaging is understandable from a maintenance point of view. However, the general argument that you can just keep using the system without using snaps "just fine" doesn't really hold if the snaps begin to replace rather than supplement software that used to be packaged without it.

The same is also somewhat true if first-class tools such as Software (as in the "store" GUI) begin to push snap packages as the first thing, because then you will, by default, need to go through additional steps to find the packages that you want, and which used to be available as the first choice.

You can still do things, of course, but it might be that you need to start getting around the snap-centric design choices more often, and at that point it doesn't come at no usability cost to you anymore.

I don't actually use Ubuntu at the moment, so I don't know how much that is the case now, but if it is (or if seems like it's going that way), I understand the frustration.

> However, the general argument that you can just keep using the system without using snaps "just fine" doesn't really hold if the snaps begin to replace rather than supplement software that used to be packaged without it.

Well, if you don't like it, you can always fork it. That's the beauty of open source. /sarcasm

Seriously though, all out replacing stuff with Snaps doesn't seem like the right move.

> it was too much work to backport featureful rolling release to debs.

Considering that (as other posters have mentioned) deb packages are released by the vendor in this case it feels like a flimsy excuse.