I know a lot of people who refuse to use Ubuntu outright specifically and solely because of snaps and how awful they are. Our developer laptops at work are meant to be running Ubuntu and I have some coworkers who only begrudgingly switched over after discovering how to prevent the 'fake snap firefox' package from being installed[0].

I get what they're going for - a way to ship self-contained (usually end-user-facing) applications with any dependencies they need without any risk of breaking other applications in the system. Unfortunately, it just results in breaking those applications specifically instead, in weird and stupid ways that are difficult to debug.

I think if snaps did the Flatpak thing - extract to a local directory instead of living on squashfs forever, or even storing them as an uncompressed disk image instead of squashfs - it might be more reasonable, but at that point you may as well just use Flatpaks like everyone else wants.

[0] - Add the following to `/etc/apt/preferences.d/no-ubuntu-firefox`:

    Package: firefox
    Pin: release l=Ubuntu
    Pin-Priority: -1

Then install the apt repository as described here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w...

This will make any `firefox` package from any repository with the `Ubuntu` label (i.e. an official Ubuntu repository) have a -1 priority, or 'never install ever'.