I guess it’s time to leave Ubuntu as a new user and switch to a new distro. Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and Mint were my choice, but their base, Ubuntu, is becoming “bloated”, and turning to a latest computers’ OS. And I think it will affect its derivatives. Which distro would you suggest to switch to. I aint rich. I’m already aware of Fedora and its xfce, kde spins, Opensuse Leap and Tumbleweed, Debian and its derivatives, and Void. Are you planning to switch too.
I think a lot of the hate is snaps. Ubuntu has pushed a technology on the users that is unpopular before (Unity) and largely ignored the criticism, which is a Windows-like behavior. I can attest that snaps really sucked on old hardware when they first rolled out. I haven’t really used Ubuntu since 22.04, so I can’t comment on the current state of snaps, other than to say that a buddy swears they are way faster now. It’s a rock and a hard place situation for Canonical though, because if Firefox from apt crashes, Ubuntu gets hate, not Firefox.