Snap is a packaging system, which like everything, has benefits along with it’s ‘drawbacks’.
You can read this old thread which explains why chromium started being changed to a snap, which highlights a huge benefit in that it allows older/newer software than your base Ubuntu system would allow via deb dependencies (ie. avoiding dependency hell).
There are situations where snap packages thrive over the various alternatives (Flatpak, AppImage etc), I’ve even read some express the view that’s not with Desktop apps; but we’re a Ubuntu flavor and thus we’ll provide snap infrastructure (even if we decide not to provide snap packages).
Yes the benefit of snaps containing their dependencies within means they can be somewhat larger than deb packages, but that was dealt with by having them compressed as squashfs files; side effect being their slow to load first time they’re run.
You can view the Lubuntu 22.04 manifest and see what snap packages we include; it’s not many being those necessary for snap to run, and requirements of firefoxitself.
From the current daily of jammy it’s
snap:core20 stable 1405
snap:snapd stable 15177
snap:firefox stable/ubuntu-22.04 1232
snap:gnome-3-38-2004 stable/ubuntu-22.04 99
snap:bare stable 5
snap:gtk-common-themes stable/ubuntu-22.04 1534
Whilst snap packages don’t have depends requirements like deb packages do by design, they do use extensions, and firefox needs some of these, shown with
guiverc@d960-ubu2:~$ snap info --verbose firefox |grep base:
base: core20
guiverc@d960-ubu2:~$ grep default-provider /snap/firefox/current/meta/snap.yaml
default-provider: gnome-3-38-2004
default-provider: gtk-common-themes
Whether or not snap is for you, only you can decide.
On my boxes that have only 1GB of RAM, I tend to avoid snap packages; but on most machines I find them very useful, even adding it on my Debian desktop (where it’s not included by default) as it saves me time & energy as some apps come easily via snap packages. By disabling snapd you can make the system a little faster to boot/login, but most of us aren’t booting our systems many times per day so that saving isn’t significant (convenience to me is worth those few seconds), but you decide for yourself.
I’ve tested what @BasilCat provided on a fresh Lubuntu 22.04 LTS QA-test install and didn’t have any issues… I didn’t live with it, but I’d not be surprised if the
apt-mark hold snapd
on the removed package would create what I’d call a minefield when your next release-upgrade came due, but it’s changes like that many of us document so we have a list of changes that may trip us when the release-upgrade time comes around.
Summary: snap packages give us another choice, or tool for our toolbox.