You don't have a choice any more unless you go very out of your way to remove the scaffolding on a fresh install.

Which of course I have done long ago on my laptop, so problem solved!

Then the other day I'm trying to spin up an aarch64 vm in qemu to test some things. What I'm testing is a gui app, which launches a url in the default browser when you press one of the buttons (github.com/bkw777/mainline , it has a button to open the upstream ubuntu mainline-ppa web site to see the extra info about available kernels) I just want to test that everything works when arch is not amd64.

So I grab the latest aarch64 ubuntu image and give it 2 cores and 4 gigs out of my laptops i7-1280P w/64g and gen 4 nvme

I need the vm to be able to run my dinky little app, and firefox, but otherwise doesn't need a full desktop running, just the X apps installed and I access it by ssh -X.

This thing was ridiculously slow, and the culprit was all snaps and snapd. Yes emulating anything in qemu is slower than not, and emulating a foreign arch is worse, and only giving it 2 cores and 4 gigs is not much either. And yet, other distros besides ubuntu ran in the same environment just fine, no worse than a cheap vps. The ubuntu installation was also fine, after removing snaps.

But the act of removing snaps was AGONIZING. It takes a stupid amount of time, like several minutes, just to uninstall one item for some steps. Uninstalling firefox in particular is just insane. What in the world can it possibly be doing for so long just to uninstall? It wasn't just stuck. The whole time it was running it was outputting occasional messages about unregistering things. This is in an otherwise fast and idle machine. A laptop but a good one, plugged in to wall power, in full performance mode, with good cooling. the qemu disk image was configured for raw not cow, the underlying ssd is a fast wd sn850 2T on a fast gen 4 pcie m.2 slot. Even if I had some sort of mis-configuration that crippled it, this does not change the fact that other systems ran fine in the same conditions, and even ubuntu ran fine after ripping out snaps and snapd.

And of course it was ridiculous to spend that much time crafting the install of a throw-away test vm. Current Ubuntu basically totally and utterly failed to be good and useful for this very ordinary random task. I only did it because the app I was testing is actually Ubuntu-specific. (well, debian-based-specific, but most users are Ubuntu and that's what needs to be tested)

I am tempted to reproduce the whole process and capture it all on video just to show in a way that can't be ignored or victim-blamed just how utter UTTER shit Ubuntu with snaps is.

It cannot be overstated. There is no level that qualifies as hyperbole. The fact that people have stupid high powered pcs not doing anything else with all that power such that the ridiculouslness is more or less hidden in day to day casual desktop use is no excuse at all.

My car will still drive more or less as ok as before in most day to day situations even if I fill the back seat with cinder blocks. That does not mean that if a car manufacturer decided to ship their new cars with 10 or 20, or even just a few cinder blocks built in that it wouldn't be utter shit and no one should buy those cars.