Canonical has been substituting snap packages in for native packages on Ubuntu without letting end users know. If you know about it then you can disable snapd or only install through apt (as far as I know that still installs native packages), but it's still an opaque change to less technical users. You can still use snap packages on Pop_OS, but it's your choice to do so. On Ubuntu, it's a lot harder to "just not use it".

Yes this is the reason I included it as a plus. Ubuntu will silently install snaps for some 'apt install' invocations, which is obnoxious. For me specifically snaps tend to get font rendering wrong and I'm not interested in troubleshooting why.

> or only install through apt (as far as I know that still installs native packages)

`apt install chromium-browser` installs Chromium as a snap package. If you don't have snapd installed, it'll "helpfully" install it for you.

It's become a binary choice between snap and flatpak, with flatpak being preferred by all major Ubuntu forks (Pop OS, elementary OS, Linux Mint). I won't be shocked if years from now Ubuntu decides snap is no longer worth it, like they did with Mir and Unity.

Mint is flatpak based? Since when? (writing this from my Linux Mint OS).

Mint is not flatpak based but it has Flatpak pre-installed in case you want to install some flatpaks. It doesn't have Snap pre-installed.

Alternatively, the *ubuntus have Snap pre-installed and recently said they are removing Flatpak support, although I believe the user can install Flatpak if they want to use flatpaks.

On Ubuntu apt installs the snap version of an app if one exists. I spent some time trying to figure out a workaround that didn't break my system but couldn't and just admitted defeat.

Uninstalling snap removed every web browser available short of lynx and w3m. That was fun. Trying to add one back also adds snap back. Next install I'm ditching Ubuntu.

Thanks for the correction and explanation. I haven't used Ubuntu in years, so all of my knowledge of its issues comes second-hand and I don't want to spread FUD about things that aren't actually issues. Sounds like the problem is worse than I thought, which just solidifies my decision to stay away.

Not really. They run a root daemon, and browsers are moved there with no easy alternative. Makes them slower to start up. No way to keep the filesystem and mount table clean without surgery, multiple steps which will need to be repeated after every version upgrade.

If you can avoid all that by using Pop or Mint, why not?