Well, given the consensus on hating Snap, this is gonna be controversial but: I think snaps are a great idea that simply needs to be refined. Positive things I

Well, given the consensus on hating Snap, this is gonna be controversial but: I think snaps are a great idea that simply needs to be refined. Positive things I see: - It gives much more flexibility to Canonical in terms of introducing changes in the system. It might mean that they can also simplify the maintenance of the distro and focus in other much more important areas. - It gives the developer much more control over the release and distribution process. - It allows to use newer versions of the software were before you had to stick in some cases with very old ones provided from the repo or go and spend a couple of hours reading and compiling the new version yourself - It integrates well with command line apps, thing that Flatpak doesn't do natively. - The process of creating a Snap is fairly trivial. A simple easy to grasp yaml file pretty much that you can place in your repo. - It provides better security by sandboxing the app and allows granular permisology via plugs. Things to refine/improve: - Speed. It is something I haven't noticed myself, but I heard people complaining about this many times. - Allow users to pick an specific version from a history of releases for a given app. In an ideal world, newer version would mean always "better" and therefore, upgrading automatically to the most recent one would be desirable, but we all here know that this is not the case and sometimes you just need to use a few releases back one. - The Snap store. There are two things I don't like: 1. The backend is not open source. 2. It is a central place controlled by Canonical. In my opinion, Canonical should make the backend available for others for allowing them to make their own stores if they want and Canonical should focus in the added value of their own (e.g providing malware scaning, payment processors, CI/CD, stats etc) Overall, I am not a Ubuntu user myself but I can understand, from a technical point of view why Canonical is trying to push for this. Unfountunatly, they are not Apple and they operating in a comunity of users that do not deal very well with impositions and pretensions from a company (and cheers to that). Having said that, I would recomend to the comunity in general to try not to be that toxic, negative and argumentative. At this point, I seriously think the worst enemy of the GNU/Linux is the comunity itself. IMHO, we should be more constructive, less arrogant and less ideological. The amount of hate I've seen towards Canonical, Snap, Systemd, Gnome and what not is simply bonkers.