The problem I have with Snap is that it's a rather mediocre over-engineered technology (e.g. decompressing images had poor performance for a long time; see the Firefox snap drama) that is pushed very hard by Canonical. It has a closed-source market and nobody knows what Canonical does on their side for performing anti-malware scans (that haven't been very reliable in the past). That's not how open-source works. We want to have a decentral approach like Flatpak repositories have.
Flatpak is my default, but sometimes I also use AppImages.

I simply don’t understand why snaps exist in 2023 with the existence of flatpaks.

I only use it for my #Nextcloud instance. #Snap does make it easy to upgrade or rollback and configure. That said I wouldn’t use it for anything else and would probably use the #docker image next time.

Why bother when you have flatpak?

They're slow, I vastly prefer Flatpaks.

For server software I prefer docker/podman,
For desktop apps I prefer native and then flatpaks

It's annoying fragmentation when even for a stable distributable package there's flatpak as a standard, and I've never seen why Ubuntu needs their own with a proprietary store.

Like I generally tend to favor native packages, but I can at least appreciate Flatpaks having advantages and times even I want to use them. (Largely when stuff is a pain to compile on Arch for library reasons.) Snap is a non-universal universal package format.

(Also going to shout out AppImages, which are an entire package as a single ELF file you can run on basically any distro. I'm not sure how good they are for important work, but I just think they're neat and have come in handy for running stuff on old CentOS in the past.)

I'm all for native packages, no appimages/snaps/flatpaks.

For instance, Joplin is only available as an AppImage, whats the result of that? On the same machine under Windows it launches instantaneously under Debian it takes 3-5 seconds to launch the AppImage. Why are we propagating this BS?

Another example, up until Debian 12, LXD/LXC was only available as a snap. Besides the overhead and the 9999 snap processes always running, snap updates your stuff automatically and you get tons of broken things.