I understand the sentiment. That said, you're forced to use deb files from Ubuntu's repositories. 🫠 There are some fundamental choices that are made for you by the OS developers. Sometimes you have more leeway, sometimes less. It's not the first time and this isn't the only system component people have complained about. Ultimately if a user disagrees with a choice that the OS developer has made about a system upon which the OS developer depends to ship a working system, it's probably wiser to switch OSes than fuck around with the system.
I can get debs from other sources, I can add non Ubuntu repos to my apt list. I can download a deb and unpack it to see what’s in it. But that’s not really my issue, I don’t want everything containerized in a proprietary format. I am currently using a different distro because of this but having used Ubuntu since 4.10 I have a pretty long relationship with the distro.
According to a recent report, Canonical's Oliver Grawert has confirmed that Ubuntu's next long-term support release will be offered in two distinct versions.
One would be the usual classic version based on Debian, and the other one would be an immutable, snap-based release that would cater to enthusiasts.
I kind of dislike the 50 bazillion mounted block devices. I'm an old gray beard at this point and I like my CLI. That's really my only complaint about it. It just seems unnatural to me. Otherwise they're fine mostly.
I've seen very similar use of loop devices in an automotive app management implementation. Each app has its own filesystem image that gets mounted on a loop device on installation, then runs from it. It's annoying on the command line but it's not a bad use case of the facility. ☺️
It's more of a double edged sword: snaps were great imho when they replaced the mess of old we had going on with thirty or so incompatible ppas.
But why force snaps for central stuff like FF/Chromium and soon Thunderbird?
I just upgraded an old PC and reinstalling Ubuntu meant that all my configs of these apps and then some broke. Snap is using incompatible storage for dotfiles and configurations. And more often than not central Desktop functions like the cursors (atm no hand cursor in FF for me!), sound and common extensions don't work ootb. For the odd piece of speciality sw I'd had to go hunting for before that's alright. But not for everyday stuff
Come on canonical, don't enshittify you great distribution...
They work pretty well on 22.04 LTS too. That's the beauty of them, they can much more easily be updated cross-OS-release. I switched my snapd to snap as well and now the whole stack is updated independently of the rest of the system. I haven't used PPAs for a few years now as a result. Following that, OS upgrades have been completely trouble free. No more broken packages left behind from forgotten PPAs.