Ubuntu was planning to ship the CUPS printing stack as a Snap in 23.10 — but after several months of testing, its changed its mind.
Accordingly, a DEB-based printing stack will feature in Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” and in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Switching to the CUPS Snap will now aim to take place during the Ubuntu 24.10 development cycle.
I use traditional packages and Flatpaks… with “user apps” being preferred as Flatpak. This is potentially safer as the OS itself can’t be affected by installing or removing these applications, and also can mitigate dependency hell as apps that require different versions of the same dependency can coexist peacefully, with each one using its own bundled version of that dependency.
I also have a couple of appimages that aren’t available as a Flatpack, and I’ll simply find an alternative to anything that is only distributed as a Snap due to the performance issues, mount clutter, and proprietary nature of the Snap distribution back-end.
This I understand, from a user space perspective the Flatpaks seems like a good thing; isolated from the OS. For a server only environment it seems to be less of an issue, provided that the sys admin knows what he/she is doing.
On a server you’re usually better off boxing stuff up in containers than using an app-in-a-zip like flatpack. Or maybe I’m just old fashioned…
If the sysadmin knows what he/she/it is doing they know different apps sometimes have conflicting library dependencies.
Isolation is more important on a server. Docker is highly successful in that space.