Sorry, I might have misremembered the exact process (this was probably three or four years ago), though no need for the nasty aggressive attitude (though my apologies if I offended you somehow).

Maybe it was version upgrades (e.g 18.04 to 20.04) instead of updates, or clean installs/new installs/reinstalls? I expect it was some of one and some of another.

At the time I used to (casually) maintain a bunch of Ubuntu computers for a few community projects, small organisations and older people who live nearby. I don’t remember the specifics, I just remember the phone calls of “the printer isn’t working” “Linux has broken my USB pen” etc, and the fix being “remove the snap version and install the deb version”. It caused a lot of problems.

Canonical provides transitional packages for packages that they’ve decided to provide as snaps. They’re not forcing anyone to use snaps, they’re saying “if you want the default we provide you, we’re providing you with a snap.”

Uhm… and why does the user have to transition to snaps? Why does Canonical provide those transitional packages while there are perfectly valid debs for the same thing? Certainly not because they have a vested interest in forcing it right?

you instantly refute yourself, kudos!

I haven’t kept up with Edge Shenanigans since I no longer use Windows, but the last time I used it I had no issues using Firefox instead of Edge.

Yeah sure you can add repositories to replace Canonical Sources to evade those dummied out packages, but you really really shouldn’t need to do that in the first place.

So the only difference is: MS enforcement is more stringent than Canonical, but they both force their respective ways onto the user (which may or may not versed enough to actually add/remove apt repositories).