The solution to that would be to fix unattended-upgrades and ship it as working by default, with an easy-to-use script to remove it. I bet that would have been orders of magnitude easier than developing snap.
But that would have kept the onus of packaging, testing, and delivering updates on Ubuntu. Instead, with snaps, they can offload all that to upstream developers. That is really the endgame here. Snap is a play for developers, not for users.
Ubuntu are saying to developers "if you build a snap, you don't have to worry ever again about distro differences! And you can update anything you need, at will!" and in exchange Ubuntu get to reduce their support costs. Win-win, right? And it is... except for power-users, who will get autoupdates shoved down their throats and their mount tables polluted up the wazoo. But nobody in Ubuntu ever cared about power-users on the desktop, really, so no news there.
The solution to that would be to fix unattended-upgrades and ship it as working by default, with an easy-to-use script to remove it. I bet that would have been orders of magnitude easier than developing snap.
But that would have kept the onus of packaging, testing, and delivering updates on Ubuntu. Instead, with snaps, they can offload all that to upstream developers. That is really the endgame here. Snap is a play for developers, not for users.
Ubuntu are saying to developers "if you build a snap, you don't have to worry ever again about distro differences! And you can update anything you need, at will!" and in exchange Ubuntu get to reduce their support costs. Win-win, right? And it is... except for power-users, who will get autoupdates shoved down their throats and their mount tables polluted up the wazoo. But nobody in Ubuntu ever cared about power-users on the desktop, really, so no news there.