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The reason for the conflicts are rarely if ever at the package layer, and more often than not with upstream changing dependencies on a .x update.

This leaves the distro maintainers two choices: either recompile/restructure the whole distro to placate one upstream, or freeze said upsteam on an older version and suffer their social media wrath.

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Or because it's a new feature release instead of just bugfixes. At least in e.g. Ubuntu, SRUs aren't accepted unless they're security or bug fixes, which makes it impossible to get newer features back to stable releases. Snaps provide a way out of this by removing the ability to break other applications with an update (since there are no dependencies).

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