“Canonical only having snap releases was harmful to adoption. I liked using lxd, but uninstalled snapd (forgetting lxd used it), and my vms obviously stopped. Snap wouldn’t reinstall properly (various inscrutable errors), so I moved it all over to libvirt. I’d still be happily using lxd if it weren’t for Canonical’s snap-pushing. That’s my anecdote of one.”
-mkj
(I’m not mkj so…, but I think most users are quite against enforcement of snapd)
They want Ubuntu users to use snap, which unsurprisingly isn’t very popular.
One of the main arguments for picking Ubuntu over Debian was the installation process, but Debian made the installation process much easier, by allowing non-free firmware.
Ubuntu got worse, and Debian got better, anyone unhappy with Ubuntu should just switch to Debian with Gnome and the problem is largely solved.
Also debian used to have ancient packages, or broken ones in testing. Now stable is fairly up to date so Ubuntu lost its value, it was just a newer stable really.
There’s also LMDE as an option.