strypeyThis is an unfinished blog post imported from the Disintermedia project on CoActivate.
Over the last 15 year or so, Ubuntu has helped to bring a lot of new users to GNU/Linux and continues to do so. Ubuntu was my first daily driver after escaping from Windows, and Trisquel has been my daily driver since escaping from Ubuntu after the Amazon Lens debacles. Given that being the transitional distro has always been one the core goals of Ubuntu, it seems logical that they would want to address two of the most common grizzles newer users have about distros; outdated versions of end user applications, and unavailability of applications user are used to from their time looking through Windows or being prisoners of MacOS.
My crystal ball says that Snap is purely a gimmick to allow newbies to be given their comfort blankets, without Ubuntu having to do the work, or take responsibility for the results. Allowing developers to package their own apps for the Snap store is cheaper for Ubuntu than doing the work of backporting or adding to their own repos. As with Firefox add-ons responsibility for any stability or security effects on the users' OS can be outsourced to the widget developer along with the packaging work.
As with Ubuntu One, it's a shame Canonical have gone about this the way they have. They could have done something more like F-Droid for GNU/Linux, a totally free code app store that the community can help package their apps to be included in, or run independent repos for. But for whatever control freaky reasons, they do what they do. Which is why we use Trisquel, not Ubuntu.
We can of course spend an infinite amount of time casting the bones and trying to skry out what Canonical might do with Ubuntu in the future. My take is that they will do whatever is simplest and cheapest. I'm guessing that building a desktop distro on top of snapshots of Debian is fairly simple, and as a result, fairly cheap. Trisquel builds a desktop distro on top of releases of Ubuntu on the smell of an oily rag, so it can't be that expensive. So it seems likely to me that under the hood, Ubuntu will continue to be what it's always been - repackaged Debian. Which means it will be pretty safe for Trisquel to be based off Ubuntu for the foreseeable future.