I remember back in 2018 when they forced snaps on everyone despite them being broken.

I had recently updated to the new 18 or 19 release and I was installing a command line tool. I did apt install and then it called snap which then didn't work. Snaps are broken by design as they way the handle software is problematic. They put everything into mounted volumes and the sandboxing isn't terribly robust. It really doesn't help that they force you to use it.

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

So like... I understand the why behind flatpaks and snaps, but I'm an end-user, and more often than not they just make things more difficult, in my opinion.

They're really great for server setups for sort of keeping each individual application from being able to deeply influence other applications or the root filesystem.

But this means if I installed the Spotify snap (at least when I last tried a few years ago) I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it to be able to access my media files where all my music was stored.

So like I said, great for out-of-the-box-server setups where the everything is a little separated from each other (kind of like Docker, from what I understand, but at the app-level? I could be wrong here.) because it helps default security settings and interactions from getting confusing quickly.

However, for your casual end-user, it can quickly become a confusing nightmare if you actually do need your applications more easily interacting with one another because you're just trying to write an email.

Anyway, that's my personal opinion: The reasons they exist server-side are pretty solid, but the reasons they exist on desktops for the end-user are less compelling and often result in user frustration.

I read a comment on Reddit a while back that pointed out how much of the open source community has no issue hosting projects on GitHub while also lampooning Snap for having a closed-source backend server. However, since Snap (and GitHub) are open source themselves, nothing is stopping curious and concerned users from auditing the codebase or hosting their own servers. I removed Snap from my Ubuntu installation and use Flatpak instead, but I do not hate Snap. And for what it's worth, I always go for the native DEB when possible...