I don’t think that the board members are sitting there and pondering how they can exercise more control on the user via snaps.

The auto updating is a nice benefit but it doesn’t seem like a big enough benefit to allocate so many developer man hours into. I would think that Canonical would realize that the developers time is better spent making features the users want.

But what do I know? I’m just someone posting on Lemmy not a Canonical board member haha

Why is Ubuntu pushing snaps so hard? Is there objectively a benefit to them apart from Flatpak?

It seems like an odd hill to die on.

I would recommend using Linux Mint. It is Ubuntu without Gnome Shell and snaps. They use Flatpak instead. I have been enjoying it ever since I jumped ship from Ubuntu about 2 years ago.