(Not so) fun stuff about the Linux services shovelling.
Having the snapd daemon running is not necessary (it may actually be undesirable).
At least on Ubuntu though, snapd can't be regularly prevented from starting at boot (`systemctl disable`) - it needs to be masked (`systemctl`, essentially, a forced disable). But if one masks it, the Ubuntu daily update will hang.
Well, one can't say that Ubuntu isn't catching up with the times :) /s
Not sure I entirely agree with this. The whole point of Ubuntu is that it's essentially turn-key. I installed 20.04 LTS on my old XPS13 and my girlfriend used it for months before realizing it was any different from a Mac. That's a good thing. That's one fewer user of MS or Apple.
For people like us, there are so many other distributions that align more with our use cases. Manjaro or Fedora are just as good as Ubuntu, but for potentially more savvy users. Or if you really really need complete control nobody is stopping anybody from running Gentoo with OpenRC. Or, the most sensible option, just use Debian.
The whole point is to give the user choices, that's the entire purpose of the Gnu/Linux universe.
Having the snapd daemon running is not necessary (it may actually be undesirable).
At least on Ubuntu though, snapd can't be regularly prevented from starting at boot (`systemctl disable`) - it needs to be masked (`systemctl`, essentially, a forced disable). But if one masks it, the Ubuntu daily update will hang.
Well, one can't say that Ubuntu isn't catching up with the times :) /s