After reading the thread, I still have no idea why it got removed, so: why did it get removed? What part(s) of the snap policies did they violate, and how is it possible that even something doesn't charge $100 a year before you can even publish a snap doesn't even notify the maintainers that their app got removed? Just because you run an app store doesn't mean Apple and Google's opaque refusal system is the part you should take inspiration from, too.
No one knows [1], except Snap. Not even the maintainers :(
Snaps response [2] seems to be:
> I understand the sudden move of signal-desktop can be disruptive for people wishing to install this package. Just to confirm the reason for the absence - Snap Store administrators had to remove the snap in accordance with our policies. We hope to have it back shortly.
I've been a happy Linux Mint users for a long time. The day they decide to "downgrade" to Snap, is the day I'm going to Debian o whatever is in vogue and user friendly at that time.
I do the same personally, and used to with my fleet at work. But Ubuntu Advantage is unfortunately a snap, so if you need any of those features, you're stuck. And we do.
And then engineers started installing snaps on their dev instances, I think mostly by accident...
Unfortunately Firefox is a snap on Ubuntu (eventually I'll get around to switching to a better distro -- "it's a laptop," I said, "it'll be nice to have Ubuntu deal with everything for me," big mistake).
It's fairly straightforward to add a PPA containing a normally-packaged Firefox. But it's always a bad sign when you start having to fight against the distro maintainer's choices.
Yeah, I'm used to starting with a base install and building up, I just tried out Ubuntu because I'd switched from desktop to laptop, remembered the bad-old-days of getting laptops working, and figured it would be nice to have Ubuntu handle all that stuff. But now I spend as much time bumping up against their design as I used to spend hunting down wifi drivers 10 years ago or whatever.
This is why I abandoned Ubuntu. I no longer wish to fight the system and I want to have something I can easily recommend to others. I don't want "snap" getting installed surreptitiously, that's far too much like Microsoft.
I went back to Debian in the end. Absolutely nothing wrong with good old apt. Nice to have a clean and predictable system that respects my choices.
I think the long term solution will be to just hop distros anyway (Ubuntu is doing their thing and it works for lots of people, they don't have to be everything for everybody, there are various other little pain-points for me that make it not really worthwhile).
The whole snap thing is clearly doomed anyway. It's got no chance of "winning" the new wave of app distribution on Linux, being easily the most-hated of the three taking any kind of similar approach (AppImage, Flatpack). Canonical just hasn't thrown in the towel yet, for whatever reason.
In my brief introduction to it, there seems to be an impedance mismatch between snaps and the entire philosophy of Linux (and Unix more generally).
When a program tries to build it's own little world without consideration for the conventions of the operating system it creates all sorts of problems and doesn't allow the user to leverage its functions as part of a complete system like they can with programs that follow the decades old Unix patterns.
What I'm saying is if Canonical wants to be in the Snaps business, perhaps they should make SnapOS.
Ubuntu minus snap is to me is still worth the headache honestly. Once you write the build script that cleans up the crap you forget it was ever even there.
Would I use Ubuntu as a desktop, oh hell no -- nothing is ever going to beat Fedora.
I would because hot damn does Redhat have their shit together when it comes to creating a stable cohesive system but I use Lightsail so my options are limited and I'm not touching Centos 8 since it's already EOL.
