Ubuntu has been on my primary computer (initially desktop then laptop) for years. Yes, so many years that at one time my primary computer was a desktop. And on my backup laptop I’ve used a few different distributions but primarily Zorin.
The one thing in common with the distributions I’ve tired was being Ubuntu based. That meant lots of features driven by what Canonical was doing with Ubuntu. Then Canonical introduced snaps. For my use snaps have been frustrating. I believe it was Ubuntu 20.04 where snap packages became default for some apps and it has progressed to more and more default snap packages.
Things that frustrated me, and continued to frustrate me until switching to Debian in 2025, was that the snap daemon would often indicate updates needed but would refuse to update. Then also, snaps broke any modification to program launch shortcuts or made the modifications difficult or impossible (or at least beyond my willingness to invest the time) to implement where, when the app packaging was still .deb, updates didn’t break customizations. And, oh geeze, the loop back devices! Go from a third or a half screen of output when mount is issued to more than a screen full. That just makes it unnecessarily difficult to track down what you’re looking for in the mount output. All of this and more caused me to start seriously looking for distributions that don’t include snap, or at least don’t include or enable it by default.
What I’ve ended up doing is migrating my primary laptop to Debian and my backup to OpenSUSE.
There have been a few bumps in the migration, mostly because of my unfamiliarity with both Debian and OpenSUSE. But hey, anytime the OS is changed there’s some bumps. Even when upgrading to a newer version of the same OS.
At this point I won’t be back to Ubuntu for a while. I’m getting comfortable with Debian on my primary and getting comfortable with OpenSUSE on the backup. The initial draft for this post was created on my backup laptop, OpenSUSE, from a coffee shop connecting to my home server. The home server is still Ubuntu but, with the exception of Let’s Encrypt, there are no snaps in use on it.