Yeah, with bazzite, kinoite, silverblue etc flatpak was always part of the equation. We opt into it. Canonical with snaps violated consent. They showed up and that was that. You got no choice. Had Canonical created a sub distro built on and testing these. There would have been a lot less ire. Instead like these new rust core utils. Everyone is an unpaid beta tester.

Snaps and DEs are what drove me from Ubuntu. Gnome2 was actually nice to use and unity was too Mac for me. Then came snaps and things kept breaking. The breaking point for me was going "sudo apt chromium" and it installing snap, then chromium through snap.

Oh, and I have never had a stable update experience. Every single update lead to me being dropped into a shell or TTY session without a functioning display manager. I tweak my system in many ways to develop software (many PPAs) and updates always meant going on the hunt for new ones to be able to develop again.

Now I'm at NixOS and although the community forums are a constant slugfest with nonstop drama (so I dont visit them anymore), the system has actually been stable for my entire usage period. A friend audibly gasped when I switched channels and updated. They too had never seen a smoother update experience between multiple different major versions (20.05 - > 24.05).

If all you do is develop in devcontainers, have no PPAs, dont modify your system in major ways and just are stock, yeah, pretty much any distro can be pleasant.