This. This is what really pissed me off about Ubuntu. I even uninstalled (or thought I did) the entire snapd system. But then I went to install something and.....it reinstalled snapd. 🤦
So I moved to Linux Mint which was an excellent experience. And just the other day I replaced that with LMDE 6 (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and I couldn't be happier.
It's the ideal distro for anyone who wants apt but not Ubuntu and doesn't want the pain of manually installing Debian.
I did a debian install this weekend, and it seemed pretty mild. It asked if I wanted separate partitions for /tmp and /home and if I wanted to encrypt my lvm. Then I chose my desktop environment from a list and that was it. It even installed grub for me.
Yes Debian 12 is easier than Debian has ever been. But your may still need to install the CUPS printing system manually, your machine may not recognise that you've attached a printer whereas on Mint it will, and it will install the driver.
On Debian you'll probably have to manually install any proprietary drivers (eg WiFi) whereas LMDE did this for me automatically.
Plus the desktop will be very bland on Debian and you'll need to take the time to obtain themes, icons etc and make it look nice. Whereas with LMDE they've already customised Cinnamon for you, saving lots of time.
Either way is fine but Debian will need more time to set up and LMDE is ready out of the box
I have the issue that the snap version can't browse files whose path includes a hidden dot file/directory in my home directory. It doesn't seem there's any clean way for me say "no, I give you explicit permission to read these files." My workaround was to sudo mount --bind ~/.foo ~/bar and then browse from ~/bar instead. I'm not sure what they think they were preventing me from doing but they failed.
Canonical's changes to apt could be considered malicious in and of themselves because it installs from a source you didn't request for, sure seems malicious to me.