I’ve been using more and more flatpaks lately on arch and fedora based distros, i have no idea how snaps compare but seems similar? Seems an odd push from Ubuntu, but could make more sense than deb packages for non techy users perhaps?

Snap is very similar just not portable to most other distros. It makes a lot of sense both for users and for vendor lock-in.

Snap is portable to other distros, look at the official website and you see a list of distros, you can use snap on. That doesn’t mean that there is no vendor lock-in, just a different kind. Snap as a format grew out of Cannonicals effort in the mobile field. Snaps where supposed to be the truly convergent successor to click, the packaging format used by Ubuntu Touch. And this history is baked into its DNA. It’s right there on the snapcraft website: “The app store for Linux”. As such Cannonical has always courted proprietary software and/or software by big companies (VS Code was first released as a snap for a reason). I think that they have always have had an eye on one day adding app payments and the sweet, sweet 30% cut they can take from every sale

The sandbox requires apparmor, so doesn’t work on anything else by default except OpenSUSE I think.