Not gonna lie, that’s concerning.
What is the “general sentiment” tho? Sure, on Lemmy and Reddit communities I usually see people hate Snaps, but that’s just a few thousands of people. Another metric of success could be developers maintaining their software as snaps. You will find that quite a lot of them do so.
If you go to snapcraft.io, you can see snap being installed on many other distributions other than Ubuntu. It will not show you the exact numbers, but people willingly install it on their machines. I think that’s successful.
It can be sad to realize that perfect privacy and security can’t be achieved, but on the other hand, what you can’t change are things such as Intel ME, proprietary blobs in android or the linux kernel. It still pisses me off, but unless the FBI specifically targets me, there’s no reason to worry about this, and so I don’t. I instead focus on minimizing data collection, and being in control of my software, which is doable.
Why should this even matter? Every android has a proprietary parts of code that need to be included even in custom roms. In case of ios devices, the entire OS is proprietary. I would much rather use a Chinese android phone with an unlocked bootloader than an american iphone.
As a fellow Ubuntu user, I think there are distros that are technically superior. But at some point I just got tired of chasing the best option. I just want an operating system that works on all devices I install it to, and that listens to my commands. Ubuntu does that just fine. I love what they’ve done with GNOME, its ram usage is minimal (1.4GB), apps launch fast, snap is nicer to use than flatpak (which I can install with a single command), and if I wanted to I can stick to an LTS for up to 12 years.
The joke here is very much just that. Immutable = not changing, therefore any update violates the idea of immutable distros.
I would suggest not judging distros by what the online community says.
Install Ubuntu and see whether you encounter any issues. If not, who cares about what some meme says.