In a surprise move, Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package set across all eight of Ubuntu’s official flavors, as of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release.
I have said and will keep saying this, Snap continues to be one of the worst things Canonical has tried to pass off as “production ready” at least in recent times, and every time they push more for it makes me consider them even more of an untrustworthy distro vendor.
My personal experience with it is that I had to nuke it off the computers I maintain last time we updated Ubuntu to the new release (unfortunately I don’t control what OS we’re using, otherwise Ubuntu would have been gone faster than you could say “Snap”), because these computers have user homes on a network drive, which isn’t under /home, and snap just flat out refuses to work when that is the case.
It wouldn’t even be such a problem if they hadn’t removed Firefox among other things from their repositories, but as it is right now, there’s no way to run Firefox on Ubuntu without mucking around with PPAs if your user home is not under /home. This bug about that has been open for 7 years!
That said, I think this is fine considering Flatpak is still going to be available in the repositories, just not installed by default. I’m much more a fan of “install what you need”, anyway. (But then again, that’s not the style of distro Ubuntu wants to go for.)