Some Of The Possible Changes Coming For The Desktop With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

[FPScholten]

What do you mean by "mandatory"? Ubuntu 19.10 - which as usual provides Firefox as default browser - will install an optional Chromium as snap package. Nothing prevents you from compiling or installing a .deb-alternative (I would expect a PPA providing such an alternative).
Apart from Chromium three or four Gnome utilities (font viewer, calculator, ...) are also installed as snaps but are equally available as normal packages in the default repo. (I've no idea about the intention behind this.)

If you remove or disable snap daemon for the desktop version of Ubuntu you cannot upgrade to a new version anymore, unless you enable snap again. The upgrade manager will fail without telling you why it cannot upgrade. (it calls snap to find out if there are snaps instaaled, but does not check first if snapd is installed or active)

[Tuxee]

If you remove or disable snap daemon for the desktop version of Ubuntu you cannot upgrade to a new version anymore, unless you enable snap again. The upgrade manager will fail without telling you why it cannot upgrade. (it calls snap to find out if there are snaps instaaled, but does not check first if snapd is installed or active)

A bug report might be the way to go then.
Talking about Chromium in specific: This has never been maintained by Canonical - you always got the version valid at release of the distro and you were always forced to resort to a PPA. Considering this aspect their snap approach makes probably more sense for the inexperienced user.

[Mez']

If you remove or disable snap daemon for the desktop version of Ubuntu you cannot upgrade to a new version anymore, unless you enable snap again. The upgrade manager will fail without telling you why it cannot upgrade. (it calls snap to find out if there are snaps instaaled, but does not check first if snapd is installed or active)

I don't know what you're babbling on about.
I upgraded my laptop to Focal Fossa just about yesterday with a view to sticking to LTS (bored of upgrading a computer I use every 2-3 months), I don't have any snap crap installed and the upgrade worked seamlessly.

[Britoid]

I just don't understand why they feel the urge to always do things differently. There really isn't a market for that. We don't need another installer. How about fully embracing DI? Or Anaconda? I don't care, just pick one, the less you're involved in the development process the more stable it will be. Anything Canonical touches breaks, really.

As someone who has to use Anaconda on a daily basis, I beg that no other distro adopts it until it's UX has been sorted out.

Anaconda whilst powerful, has a terrible UI which makes the Arch install process seem easier. It's probably the worst thing about Fedora.

[arQon]

If you remove or disable snap daemon for the desktop version of Ubuntu you cannot upgrade to a new version anymore, unless you enable snap again. The upgrade manager will fail without telling you why it cannot upgrade. (it calls snap to find out if there are snaps instaaled, but does not check first if snapd is installed or active)

This is simply not true.

Hate on Ubuntu all you want - there are plenty of real reasons to :P - but false "information" like this doesn't help anybody.

[FPScholten]

This is simply not true.

Hate on Ubuntu all you want - there are plenty of real reasons to :P - but false "information" like this doesn't help anybody.

This has been reported (for the upgrade to 18.04 I believe) and had not been resolved at least for the upgrade to Eoan. I am using Ubuntu and reporting bugs for it.

[arQon]

Well, IDK what's going on with your system then, but you've obviously found something novel: Mez (see above) and I have both had no problems with dist-upgrades. On most of my machines snapd is purged outright, but I did have one where it was just disabled and updating that to 19.10 worked fine too. So I can't help (sorry) but it might be worth trying whichever of those you didn't do last time and seeing if that fixes it, as a stopgap.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Did I happen to mention that the graphical installer still doesn't support dual boot encryption?

What do you mean? Two Linux installs, or Linux/Windows mix, or something more esoteric? On one drive or two? I gave up trying to get Windows and Linux to coexist on the same drive back with SuSE 9.2... always gone with two seperate drives since then. Particularly with the advent of SecureBoot and UEFI, it means that the two OSes aren't fighting for the same EFI System partition.

I've successfully installed Mint 19 into an encrypted LVM on one SSD (with Windows 10 Pro on another SSD), then got nVidia drivers working for CUDA, grub-updated to get Windows into the boot list then enabled Bitlocker via TPM in Windows 10. It works... or it did. That laptop did something weird a while ago and the TPM chip decided it wasn't happy with letting me into Windows via a PIN. Password was fine, but PIN? No, not having it.