> Changing a paradigm usually involves pushing the envelope and breaking some existing assumptions; systemd is everybody's favorite example of that in the Linux world.
At the risk of reigniting this particular flamewar, systemd changed that paradigm for the worse, using flimsy arguments that don't hold much water to anyone who knows better. Comparing snap to systemd doesn't exactly do the former a whole lot of favors.
> Browsers like FF and Chromium [on Windows] simply self-update
If I was okay with this being the norm then I'd still be using Windows.
> Ubuntu, since 16.04 LTS, ships with unattended-upgrades enabled
That's horrifying.
> and how reluctant users (like my dad and my wife!) are to click on "Install now" in the update-manager dialog.
Your dad and your wife are reluctant for good reason. Having experienced first-hand how prone Windows updates are to break things, and now seeing an admission here that y'all want to make Ubuntu more like Windows, this doesn't bode well in the slightest for a good user experience.
Like, one of the main points I make to people to convince them to at least try a Linux distro is "well unlike Windows it won't shove updates down your throat, and the updates are quick and easy and painless anyway". And then here comes Canonical wrecking the former assumption (and who knows how it's impacting the latter, but I don't exactly have high hopes).
Not that it matters much since I've given up on Ubuntu (in favor of openSUSE) in my recommendations to others (and switched to Slackware for my own use) ever since God-Emperor Mark chose to double-down on the Amazon Lens instead of listening to His users. Every once in awhile I take a look at Ubuntu again, hoping that maybe Canonical's figured things out, but always come away disappointed. It's always a bummer, given that my first distro was Ubuntu 7.10, and every once in awhile I'll fire that one up in a VM and remind myself what Ubuntu used to be, before it seemingly became a soulless husk of a distro.
But I digress.