Snaps have been awful in the past, but they are dramatically better in 23.10. With most of them, there’s really no noticeable difference. LibreOffice is still pretty slow though.

I don’t get the complaints about mounts. So you run the mount command with no arguments and there’s a bunch of them. What’s the big deal? If need be, just use grep to filter out snaps.

I wouldn’t say they are tricking users either. They are transitioning to a new package manager. For better or worse, snaps are the future of Ubuntu. They are handling the transition by layering snapd on top of the legacy base.

I’m not some rabid Ubuntu fan. I’ve never used it beyond just checking it out from time to time. But, objectively, it’s a great distribution. They pretty much check all of the important boxes. It’s easy, it’s reliable, it’s secure, it’s a mature organization, there’s good community support as well as paid support, and it’s Linux. Unlike Red Hat, they give away the same exact product they sell to enterprises and even provide years of updates without a support contract. They do a hell of a lot to push Linux forward, particularly on the desktop, and we all benefit no matter which distro we use. They’re ok in my book even if snaps are meh.