I don’t mind snaps either, it’s an interesting idea for a universal packaging concept. My issue with them is the performance. They aren’t nearly as performant as native and theming doesn’t work as well out of the box.
If I’m going to use something like that all pre-packaged, I’d use either flatpak or appimage. I would still avoid snaps at all costs.
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So, for example, the snap version of Firefox is slower than the native version. I don’t see a significant difference between the two.
Firefox is the outlier in all of the snap packages. Canonical and Mozilla have put in a great deal of work to get it to where it’s at. It went from a 30 second cold start to a 10 second, then 6 second, and I think it’s currently around 4.
Clicking an app icon to watch it bounce for 10 seconds, do nothing, then finally launch can be infuriating.
Another difference is snap a proprietary package format (developed, maintained, and entirely the property of Canonical), and the other format is a native .deb, .rpm, or whatever. If you want to stick to FOSS, you should avoid snap.
For most users, you don’t need the modularity or container style approach that snap has. There may not be significant differences noticed at first, but there are differences. In how it address the file system, how it updates, etc. Snap packages have been known to have update issues also. Just look at how the snap store on Ubuntu (installed as a snap) will constantly fail to update or transmits errors that it can’t update.
As a side note, for universal packaging formats, there are better options available like flatpak or appimage.
I experienced this recently, even though the snap version of Firefox is supposed to automatically check for available updates several times a day, but I didn’t notice this, it had to be updated manually.
I don’t like what I’ve read lately about Canonical corporation. Oh well Flatpaks didn’t really catch on with “the people”, but I don’t know how they expect to improve on that since Flatpaks could probably be used on distros without “systemd”. Either way I have to emphasize again that I’m against “snapd” and if they have any Ubuntu flavor behaving further like Windows I’ll be forced to forget about it.
Ubuntu adopter recently…
I’m running LTS 20.04 on a Dell XPS-9315. I haven’t noticed any slowdown when using Firefox.
I launch it and boom…loads blazing fast.
Strangely, Brave loads like a turtle compared to Firefox.
Regarding snapd, I can see the concerns.
If I wanted to rip out snapd, I could or migrate to Linux Mint however I know that I am unable to tolerate any downtime since I am a part-time student working a full-time job.