It isn't. But they are pushing it more aggressively. The latest release will tell you it can't even open .deb files anymore. The Ubuntu store will load indefinitely and not be able to install it. ( read it in a blog post ). And it's opening deb files in archive manager by default rather than the software centre.

Even if it is just a bug. It is one they are refusing to fix ( and one that I can't imagine being difficult to solve ).

It still works over CLI for now, which is how I usually install deb's. But if I have to go online to download all kinds of debs it feels like I'm back in the 90s windows downloading a bunch of exe's I no have to manage myself.

It's more of a statement against Ubuntu and how canonical is handling the snap packages. Maybe it won't be so easy to disable it in the future. Or maybe apt will barely be able to install anything anymore if you disable snap since that seems to be all they went you to run.

In any case. I don't really like the direction they're headed, and I'd rather not have to distro hop in two years because canonical decide to make snap mandatory.

Snap has not worked out well for me in the past :(.

We're in a thread about Windows malfeasance and that's what the Windows users say about their ad-ridden trash heap of an OS. Why would we tolerate the same behavior just because it is on top of a Linux kernel?