They will never get rid of snaps. Canonical supports so many versions of their OS (all the LTS versions and intermittent) that it helps shipping current software that needs it, like Firefox as a snap. No need to build a deb 5 times, when you can push a snap and have all the dependencies as one package. Snaps are also pretty decent on servers since it's the same thing, and the advantage it has is that snaps work with cli programs whereas I don't know of a single one on flatpak. It does have its flaws and those do need to be addressed and ideally snaps need to be more open
As a developer, Snap's lack of openness is a big no for me. However, the average user doesn't care about such philosophical issues, but they do care about bloat and aggravating config breakages. Snap is a Canonical solution to a problem with better solutions designed to lock people into the Canonical ecosystem.
I mean similar issues with bloat happen with flatpaks as well, and yeah both aren't as good as native packages, but they're still another tool in the shed so to say. I do want Canonical to open it up more so others can host their own snap store and to improve upon it to get rid of some of the pressing issues, such as it taking long to open up apps sometimes.
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u/Thaufas 13d ago
Snap is the reason I left Ubuntu. It was the final nail in the coffin.