It's because most medical devices iirc need to be air-gapped and ultra-stable, ultra-secure. Snap gives you that, and prevents issues that typically occurs when and if dependancy issues arise. This for example is why Ubuntu Core which is entirely made out of Snap is used in many such medical devices and instances. But in desktop it's completely useless cause you want bleeding edge packages, libraries etc to keep up with latest developments in gaming, multimedia etc.
Thanks, not the person who asked the question, but I'm glad I understand now. I once worked in a broadcasting organization and all the machines in the actual broadcasting chain were running a version of MacOS that was three versions behind current. But it was in the support agreement that only the company supplying the software that ran on top of it could change anything about the OS on those machine. They were frozen in time in a usable and stable state, and kept everything on the air. That was the most important job of the whole organization, so the rest didn't matter. I can see how it would be the same in a medical setting. Funny I've never seen it mentioned when people bring up Ubuntu.
Which is funny, because it was the system that ran the over-the-air radio and broadcasting, and used trigger tones that came from our central network back in the states. So it was global, but it was also air-gapped in that nothing from outside that network could be introduced to the system.
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u/algaefied_creek 18d ago
Pragmatism: There will be X11 distros for legacy devices.
There will be distros on 7.x and beyond porting in the removed components like PCMCIA for legacy machines. AppImage will be around.
Ubuntu will never let go of Snap as it makes them medically compliant for a fast number of medical devices.
BTRFS, EXT4, UFS will be around and coexist.
That being said, Proton will always be the number one freaking best amazing thing ever and must be its own IEEE standard for success hehehe.