You're absolutely right. Snaps do solve legitimate problems that we've struggled for years with and are the right thing to do architecturally. Corner cases that

You're absolutely right. Snaps do solve legitimate problems that we've struggled for years with and are the right thing to do architecturally. Corner cases that might affect certain users like holding versions or disabling updates entirely "when the user really knows what they're doing" should just be fixed as they arise. But again, snaps or any equivalent system that allows stupid-simple packaging, bundling dependencies, doing fail-proof transactional updates and running in per-app confinement has been proven valuable by the mobile world and not only (automotive and embedded come to mind). It's high time the typical desktop/server Linux operating system got such a system by default. What we need is to iterate over it to cover its gaps. For example the one sticking point I see in this thread when people really get pressed to argument their unhappiness with snap seems to come down to being unable to stop the auto-updating behavior. I could easily see Canonical implementing a feature to control that and putting it behind an explanation of the downsides and a "Disable this only if you know what you're doing!" warning. And so on for the rest of the corner cases. And from developer's point of view, I can attest that if I'm to package and publish something for Linux, I'd certainly use snap or Flatpak or both before using deb or rpm so long as they're not affecting me in some major negative way. I assure the reader this is not the minority opinion and the software catalog is only going to grow because of it. This is our way out of PPAs and dependency problems (among other things) for publishing up to date out-of-distro software. I have no problem with a particular set of users not wanting the latest version if they know what they're doing but that doesn't negate the benefits this kind of a system brings. We've seen this play out with other new and needed Linux systems before and that's OK.