There are Pros and Cons for everything, but when a distro’s development team makes big changes in policy towards users, there’s always a reason for it, and it’s not always a reasonable choice. Such may be the case with Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution. There’s a big discussion about it going on in their forums (clicky here to have a look). Yes, this matters a lot because it affects every flavor of Ubuntu and every “downstream” project derived from Ubuntu (Linux Mint, Linux Lite, ElementaryOS, and one zillion and twelve others).
Snaps and Flatpaks and such are probably the future anyway, but the vetting of software by a bunch of testers before distribution to users should never go away. But unless you build your own OS from scratch (and some people do), you have to live with whatever the distribution developers decide.
That would be most of us. This “apparent” decision by Ubuntu developers, while probably relieving them of the burden of maintaining packages for their users (and making their job a lot easier and not having to keep package maintainers on the job getting updates to testers and then to users), it also means that we ordinary desktop users could end up as unwitting software testers, trying to find workarounds for broken software. We’re already finding that in instances where the Snap version of a software won’t work but the .deb version from the repository works fine, or vice versa. And that, more than anything else, has been my chief complaint with Ubuntu for years: Making unwitting testers out of novices and newbies without their knowledge (let alone consent).
Read the linked discussion and offer some comments! I’d love to know what some of my Linuxer readers think of this new trend.
Robin's Rants and Raves 
🤔 One can disable Snaps and strictly use .deb files if they wanted to.
I do not think that this would affect Linux Mint because they utilize the Flatpak system.
Personally, I do not like the direction in which Ubuntu is headed.
Ironically, Snaps as the default will not affect Ubuntu. Ubuntu’s fanbase will complain a little but they will eventually adapt.
Unfortunately, the newcomers to Ubuntu will perceive Snaps as being normal.
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I just checked the mostest mintiest website and couldn’t find a mention of Ubuntu going crazy. Forum seems unconcerned, too. And Mint always have LMDE as a great alternative if Ubuntu should auto combust and blow up in a fireball. Fortunately I never really bought into the *buntu universe and went the Archie way long ago, so I couldn’t care less if the whole *buntu world falls apart.
And can finally someone explain to me what this Snap and Flatpak shit is? Do I need it?
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