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> Mint never shipped snapd, Snap's daemon program or any snaps, but moving ahead, in Linux Mint 20, "Chromium won't be an empty package which installs snapd behind your back. It will be an empty package, which tells you why it's empty and tells you where to look to get Chromium yourself." Further, APT will forbid snapd from installing.

Can't they just replace the Chromimum package with the one in Debian?

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Not sure if they could, but:

Then they would need to review all Ubuntu packages for snap injection and overlay them. Sure that might be doable automatically but is a bit brittle.

It also means the user wouldn't learn what is going on.

They are already doing a special case for Chromimum to tell the user why its empty and where to get it. Instead they could provide a working copy based on the debian deb package.

I understood it so that they are blocking snap generally instead of doing pretty package special handling.

The Chromium situation has been explained already in 2019, https://snapcraft.io/blog/chromium-in-ubuntu-deb-to-snap-tra...

There is no deb package in Ubuntu, so the system is setup to transparently install the snap package.

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