When spinning up a VPS or a local LXC, reaching for Ubuntu has almost become reflexive for me. It’s what most tutorials a**ume, the server images are tuned for it, and it’s what many of the internet’s Linux instances already run, but you hardly see it land on an enthusiast’s daily-driver desktop anymore. The preferred distros for desktop use have firmly shifted toward Arch-based flavors, Fedora, and Mint. If you’ve been paying attention, you’d know that this is hardly an accident, and one particular design decision explains a lot of it: Canonical’s all-in bet on snap packages.