Canonical could really have really swept up a lot of former Red Hat developers if they'd simply redact and undo the whole Snap fiasco.
For a user-respecting OS, people have few options other than Arch (for quick security updates) or Debian (for LTS) anymore...
I used to think Canonical's tradeoffs were acceptable, but corporate control tends too much to try and declare their position disingenuously via marketting ploys instead of merit.
Snaps "solve" centralized automation but are also the cause of lost trust by making it under their control. Between automation and trust, I would rather they just solved the trust part by trusting the user (by default) to own/control all the automation.
Engineers know better what's actually at stake... it's a shame because this white-knuckle corporate greed is precisely what keeps me from advising anyone to trust this OS - they could have gotten so much growth and profit if they cared more about their real users than they do about their user's management. Instead, people swarm away, telling everybody why (hint: "snaps"), and Mr. Shuttleworth just watches while users drain away, looking for a vendor they can trust and finding, today, none.
