Interesting, didn’t know it was feasible to make the distribution open.
That doesn’t give me much to complain about in theory, but canonical has lost way too much good faith to give people a reason to keep open snap distribution going for free. They should definitely consider hosting an open store just to get people on board again.
Nothing in theory makes that an issue of flatpaks and snap, just that both rely on different means to interact with the host system that have been woefully slow to implement. If enough protocols are developed a flatpak or snap should be as capable as a native app with the safety benefits for free.
Honestly if not for the convoluted Linux FS layout, debs would be pretty serviceable and aren’t really different to the Windows solution. The fs layout makes installations way too fickle to clashing with other applications.
That and dependency hell, which distros should have never been allowed to touch beyond the core dependencies required to get your desktop running.
Nothing necessarily at the tech level. They’re more capable than Appimages or flatpaks to the point that you can use it to build a reproducible system hardened against tampering or defective updates.
The downside is that it’s controlled entirely by canonical, has limited abilities (if any?) for hosting storefronts/packages outside of their ecosystem, and said ecosystem is insecure and has already allowed multiple waves of malicious apps to reach end users because of poor moderation of listings masquerading as legitimate versions.
Canonical has also been increasingly hostile to flatpaks - removing it from Ubuntu and derivatives by default to push users towards snap.
The whole loopfs thing is just an annoyance, but the aggressive posturing by canonical as well as the closed nature of the storefront that has led to malicious attacks on end users is enough to give it more than a few haters.
I much prefer our modern package format solutions:
Size isn’t an issue imo. Applications are bulky for many more reasons than their packaging formats.