From the linked announcement: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906 > Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them or even point snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it…
> Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them... I think it should be noted that this generally applies to the addition of "third party apt repositories" in general, use of which is the problem that snaps fix[1] Some snaps are built from Free Software and reproducible sources, as are some third party apt repositories. In other words, if this criticism bothers…
This does not follow at all. Third-party apt repositories work just like Ubuntu's apt repositories; you have just as much ability to audit, hold, pin, etc. in both cases.
If there is a difference in reliability (software from third-party repos is more likely to break your system--and, btw, software from Canonical's repos has also broken systems in the past, so "avoid third party repos" is not a guaranteed way to avoid software breaking your system), using snaps to install third-party software instead of third-party repos does not fix that problem: the third-party provider is still just as unreliable as before and their software is just as likely to do something stupid.