Wouldn't that make every distro based on Ubuntu also convert?

If someone spins a distro off from another distro, he or she is using the older distro as a foundation. It does not mean that the new spin will replicate every feature of its parent distro.

Features can be added, modified, or removed.

I am afraid I will have to get my feet murky distro hopping.

I like live boots, .deb, XFCE, user-friendliness, & I don't want to be confined to Snap packages.

If a repository is gutted for app packages, child distros will have to grow & move on.

snap doesn't spread its tentacles everywhere, not yet anyway. De-snapping ubuntu is easy, I now have two different LTS ubuntu installations - 20.04 and 22.04, both are snap-free. Snap is just a package and a handful of other packages which were converted to snaps depend on it - remove snap, replace those packages with normal versions and you are done.

2 members found this post helpful.

Is there any problem securing the installable versions of the same packages everyone is expected to use Snap for?

E.g., I just want Chromium 106 amd64 .deb & the repository doesn't update though it would work fine in Ubuntu 16.

Is Snap the culprit?

In regards to Ubuntu, they stopped packaging chromium-browser for 20.04; their last package for 18.04 was version 112. So yes, likely snap is the culprit, as once those versions left standard support they stopped packaging it, and supported versions are meant to use the snap.

Ss I linked for you in another thread, there is a PPA with chromium 112 for Ubuntu 16.04, but it is not in official ubuntu repos. You may be able to find the older 106 in some archive if you insist on that version, although may have to build it yourself.

Debian, Mint, Bodhi and likely other distros continue to offer chromium deb packages tho, and that same PPA offers current version for ubuntu users who don't want to use snap, but likely depend on newer libraries than Ubuntu 16.04 offer.

No, the ancient unsupported distro is the culprit, on 16 dependencies of modern chromium versions would make installation impossible. Ubuntu itself is not independent, it is based on debian which doesn't use snap, so ubuntu replaces normal debian packages with snaps and you could replace them back with debian versions but only as long as you distro is based on a supported debian version. Rob Savoury's PPA mentioned above installs not just the chromium, but a fuckton of updated dependencies, and it doesn't always work well.

OP opened several threads about the very same question. Wanted to run a new Chromium on Ubuntu 16. Probably there will be a thread in the future with different result.