You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.

Snaps are a Canonical thing and is only used by default on Ubuntu and distro's based on Ubuntu. No other distro uses or recommends them.

Those are the popular distros though. Switch to something else and you trade 1 problem for 10.

If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.

Flatpak is available on every distro.

Ehhhh

Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.

Dozens of SUSE

Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.

So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.

Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.

Snap is Ubuntu and derivatives only which is a respectable but smaller segment of the options.

It's also a fucking system daemon that runs in the background. Avoid.

Flatpak is available on every distro.

Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.

Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.