The server is proprietary and last I checked you can’t even turn off auto-updating or verify the binaries they push to you.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/

In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point Snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.

Research what happened to Upstart, Mir or Unity. It won’t take long until snap becomes one of them. Somebody at canonical seems to desperately obsess over having something unique, either as a way to justify canonicals existance or even in the hopes of making the next big thing. Over all these years they never learned that whatever they do exclusively will always fall short of any other joint efforts in the linux world, because they always lack the technical advances, ability/will to push it for a prolonged time and/or the non-proprietary-ness. So instead of collaborating like every serious linux vendor, they’re polluting their distro with half-assed, ever changing and unwanted experiments. They’re even hijacking apt commands to push their stupid snap stuff against the users intent. With the shengians they’re pulling Ubuntu cannot be relied on, and with that they’re sabotaging their own success and drive away any commercial customers that generate revenue.

In addition to what’s already been said, Canonical have a history of starting grandiose projects and then abandoning them a few years later. See Mir, Unity, and Ubuntu Touch for examples.

I especially hate how it ruins the df -h command. Install a dozen snaps and it becomes unreadable

Personally I think for home users or niche there should be a snap less variant of this distribution with all the bells and whistles.

There is : Linux Mint

Snaps are proprietary, flatpacks are not, is the long and short of it

I would hate snaps a lot less if Ubuntu just stopped trying to force me to use them.

snapdeez nuts

Its been a while but the last time I was running ubuntu I ran into an infuriating issue related to snaps. To be fair I can’t remember the exact details and it was related to some web dev stuff. All I remember is that I quit Ubuntu for a while fighting with snaps for a day or two.

Calling it hate is an exaggeration , people are entitled to their opinion and informing other people by criticizing snap.

Another advantage not mentioned is that snap is a product of canonical (a for profit company talking about an IPO for years), flathub is managed by the gnome foundation (a US registered non profit, which should provide some legal protection).

they both suck.

I’m personally not a fan of any universal packaging solution. I’ve tried flatpaks, appimages, and snaps, and ran into weird, annoying issued that I just never have when I install via package manager, build from source or even just run a portable build of an app.

I see the appeal of a universal package, but imo a bigger emphasis on portable native builds would solve a lot of the issues these packaging solutions are aiming for, while not introducing many of the downsides

I like snap. On Ubuntu, it does everything Flatpak does and it can also do system components. It’s a system that allows to build a complete OS with the benefits of Flatpak. It’s a fairly well designed system and it came earlier than Flatpak. It works well for Ubuntu and its developers. There’s a lot of misinformation around it and the wider community seems to have jumped on the Flatpak wagon. That means we’re unfortunately gonna get mixed classic-base (deb, rpm) with Flatpak apps OSes in the longer term, instead of full Snap OSes. That’s a lame compromise but it is what it is. Not the first time the Linux community chooses technically interior tech for ideological reasons. Ultimately we use other people’s labor so we get what they decide and that’s alright. Classic core plus Flatpak is still way better than the all-classic status quo so I ain’t mad.

The problem with snap isn’t that it’s useless, it’s that it’s garbage. Snaps are just plain worse in every way, compared to other packaging formats. They impact boot time A LOT… like A LOT A LOT on a hard drive, use a ton of space, are slow to launch unless you use like tricks or what not to speed up consequent launches after the 1st one, the store backend is proprietary and poorly moderated, the store is slow and unresponsive, and cannonnical is pulling some real micro$oft-esk shit to try and force them on users… Stuff like aliasing apt commands to snap, disallowing ubuntu spins to ship flatpak by default, etc…

The only redeeming quality that snaps have is that you can run CLI/server programs as a snap, and even then, just use docker lmao.

As you can probably tell by all the lovely comments about Snaps, that’s the reason. Snaps is crap, by design.