ok, what is snap and why should I care?

One of my friends spent like a month distrohopping just to find a debian-based distro that fits these two criteria:

• First-class support for KDE

• Isn’t broken all the time

Ubuntu fails both. KDE Neon excels on the first one, but fails harder than ubuntu on the second one. Kubuntu as well. Debian has horridly outdated packages, and he refuses to use nix/flatpak. Tuxedo OS is obscure and broken. Mint is great, but installing KDE takes some effort.

He finally settled on Ubuntu Server with the native KDE package. Still has to do some weird incantations to banish snap tho.

How did things get this bad?

This is why I use Windows.

sudo apt-mark hold snapd

8.10 was the last good Ubuntu. (It also had the best default wallpaper ever)

If you look at the “improvements” in every release since, you’ll notice that shit like they do currently isn’t an accident:

9.04 integrated web services into the main user interface.
9.10 integrated Ubuntu One (Ubuntu’s OneDrive, upgradable for money) by default and introduced the slooooow Ubuntu Software Center
10.04 integrated an interface to post on social media
10.10 added app purchases in the Software Center
11.04 made Unity the default
11.10 removed Gnome as fallback to Unity
12.04 introduced the buggy HUD
12.10 added the famous Amazon ad lense to it by default

and it goes on like this…