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.

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

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.

Lost a couple hours of work on the snap version of krita since it couldn’t save the file for some reason. Switched away from Ubuntu as a whole after that experience.

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.

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).

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

Snap hate is largely illogical and brain dead in my view and experience. I see them at same level as systemd haters. We know how that turned out.

Snap is the only packaging system that provides sandboxing for system applications. But nobody will tell you this.

I no longer use Ubuntu since I matured enough for Debian, but I can use Ubuntu over other immature or weird distros any day.

they both suck.

snapdeez nuts

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

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

When I install this snap am I getting a kernel driver, a native raw binary, or a containerized user application that conforms to a communication interface? Who knows! They’re all mostly undifferentiated in the store.

What about a third party store? Only if you fork the snap daemon and change the hard coded URL. And good luck with that mandatory Canonical contributer agreement you have to sign.

Want to pick when your apps update? Nope. That’s the official stance. They will never support that. But here’s a way to manually block network access to the daemon if you really really need to. But then everything will update at once when you give it access again.

Want a specific version of a snap? See above. Explicitly will never be an option.

“I guess there’s a fee to pay to get access to quality apps.” Incorrect. There is no real vetting process for what’s added to the store, there’s barely even minimal checking that you’re not overwriting someone else’s snap. You do have to sign the Canonical contributor agreement, and setup an identity to submit as, but even if your snap is proven to be malware there a good chance it will stay in the store, or can be immediately re-uploaded.

Well, things like the fact that snap is supposed to be a distro-agnostic packaging method despite being only truly supported on Ubuntu is annoying. The fact that its locked to the Canonical store is annoying. The fact that it requires a system daemon to function is annoying.

My main gripes with it stem from my job though, since at the university where I work snap has been an absolute travesty;
It overflows the mount table on multi-user systems.
It slows down startup a ridiculous amount even if barely any snaps are installed.
It can’t run user applications if your home drive is mounted over NFS with safe mount options.
It has no way to disable automatic updates during change critical times - like exams.

There’s plenty more issues we’ve had with it, but those are the main ones that keep causing us issues.
Notably Flatpak doesn’t have any of the listed issues, and it also supports both shared installations as well as internal repos, where we can put licensed or bulky software for courses - something which snap can’t support due to the centralized store design.