From the linked announcement: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906
> Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them or even point snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.
This is a great summary of why people rightfully feel nervous about Snap. People run linux because they want visibility and control into what is happening on their systems. Canonical seems to want to take away that visibility and control from their users.
From an IT perspective:
I can set up an internal APT mirror for my users, servers, test systems, etc., but I can't set up an internal snap mirror as far as I can tell. This means that despite having an internal repo that I can whitelist, some package installations will now arbitrarily require internet access. I can no longer install chromium on a system without access to the internet, and package installation will fail as a result.
I'd rather have an older version than a snap version, personally, but better would be two packages which Provides: the same chromium-browser, chromium and chromium-snap.
The most irritating thing here is that they're using a package distribution system which handles dependencies and updates flawlessly, and has for decades, and using it to install things using a package system which does not solve those problems, and instead ships multiple copies of multiple libraries and applications, which run slower, ignoring any settings I have in APT.
So far, it's a maintenance nightmare, and I loathe it.