The sad thing about snap is that I actually much prefer it to flatpak usability-wise (and also technically it’s much more interesting as people have noted), but limiting distribution to a single Canonical-owned repository is the most bizarre, anti-Linux move I can think of that I can’t support it.
My belief is that this is the case for everything Canonical does these days, and it’s why Ubuntu has dropped nearly all of their desktop-specific projects (Unity, Ubuntu Touch, etc.) nowadays. Just looking at ubuntu.com you can tell they no longer care about desktop as a platform. Yet another reason I don’t think Ubuntu Desktop is the way to go for new Linux users in 2023.
Even though I am not using Ubuntu myself, I am using openSUSE TW by the way, but if I have to set up a Linux box for my friend, family, etc. providing that I can’t/don’t always have a time to help them fix some issue along the way, I would definitely install the box with Ubuntu.
Here are the reasons why:
I am fighting apps compatibility issues on openSUSE all the time, regardless of the packaging format. For example, O3DE Snap fails to build the project on openSUSE, Pano crashes the entire desktop because of sqlite3 issue, Distrobox is not usable only on openSUSE currently, etc. Moreover, even though it’s using the same .rpm packaging format as Fedora, but most .rpm are not packaged with openSUSE in mind, some might not work at all, and some might work with a broken functionality, e.g. Kopia can’t check for update when installing with .rpm package. Therefore, most of the time, I find myself using AppImage the most, but it’s not as straight forward, especially for new users.
I wouldn’t let my friend use Fedora either, as it’s a fast pace distro, but without any out-of-the-box rollback system in place. This was the main reason why I went with openSUSE instead.
But I agree and also have the same feeling about their website, though.
This is the main advantage OpenSUSE has over Fedora in my opinion. I’ve never understood why Fedora, a distro that leaned in to BTRFS as a default pretty early on, never integrated some form of snapshotting tool like snapper or timeshift. It feels like they just made the transition to BTRFS and then just left it at that. OpenSUSE seems like they put a lot more thought and focus into their BTRFS implementation, Fedora should follow their lead with snapper or something similar to it. If nothing changes OpenSUSE will likely be my next desktop distro. It has a really solid community as well. Smaller, but very level headed, technically curious, and friendly.
You won’t get Apparmor confinement on Fedora (or any other distro without apparmor) which is the main part of snap’s security confinement. It wont be any better than installing as an rpm.
What exactly of Snap’s Apparmor confinement doesn’t work on other distros? I run Snap on Arch and the Apparmor profiles seem to load fine. The few tests I did didn’t show anything suspicious.