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Technical stuff aside, a major reason why Flatpak does not get the hate Snap does is because users don't resent it.
There are 2 things people hate: the way things are, and change.
Ubuntu put Snaps on users desktops without asking if they wanted them. They just did it, then closed off ways to opt-out/avoid them (Cf. Firefox).
Forced change fosters resentment.
No distro made Flatpaks default/required/opt-out. Users had time to come to the tech and adopt it on their own terms/needs.
Just IMO.
It's a glib comparison but Snaps remind me a bit of that time Apple put a (free) U2 album on everyone's iPod/iPhone and assumed everyone would be grateful but people were REALLY annoyed by it.
@omgubuntu today I was running apt upgrade and as an software 'update' i got entire new snap install of firefox. Even as I had one installed from flatpak for entire time I have this ubuntu install...
If I wanted I should be able to have it compiled from source or something else entirely. But no, ubuntu people know better whats best for me.
This approach is strikingly similar to windows and it's 'we will not let you uninstall edge'
@astromateusz @omgubuntu Also make sure to apt remove Firefox. Something probably happened with the transitional packaged that prompted the reinstall.
@omgubuntu also snap has only a single proprietary store. Flatpak has multiple and is open source.
@Pixdigit @omgubuntu and, from an enterprise perspective, everything I've read says snaps update when the store tells them to, not when the admin does.
Not giving me a way to schedule and control when my systems check in for updates, and when they get deployed, is a fantastic way to get a "no, thanks" from me
@omgubuntu I think it also have some echoes of Canonical wanting snap to stick around badly, so it feels forced a bit? Community around flatpak - and it has tons of controversies for sure - have just grown more organically, and it responds to challenges better. I haven't invested time to understand snap, so I have no reflection point against it.
@peteriskrisjanis Organic is a great descriptor. There's been very little organic about Snaps, even the big-name software didn't get there organically (the stories are out there of Canonical cold-calling developers to pressure them into adopting Snaps, and in many cases, doing the work for them).
@omgubuntu Right. Instead of saying, "Thing is great, you have no choice to adopt it for XYZ. Oh, it broke something? Too bad!" the Flatpak approach was, "we'll make this thing available, and let people offer their apps on it. Oh, people like it? Great!"
They let people make their own decisions, and had it prove its benefit.
@omgubuntu You're holding it wrong.
@omgubuntu that's exactly it! Open source is supposed to be about choice.
@baiteh @omgubuntu No, it is supposed to be about freedom.
@omgubuntu I think people were more pissed that they couldn’t remove the album at the time lol.
@omgubuntu No, no, it's a very appropriate comparison.
Only you can't really get rid of the album this time :P
@omgubuntu IMO it's less "It was forced on us" (Ubuntu 'forces' tons of changes, like default apps and stuff like pulseaudio over the years). It's more that a) it was pretty broken for a desktop experience, and b) it's Canonical - it's in 
vogue to hate on Canonical, and hard to trust, c) propriatary backend (although this is overblown), d) Was mostly Ubuntu only, e) (next toot)
@omgubuntu One big reason is that there was (from the user space) no *need* for snaps. Most users just assume that all that packaging to update software is done magically in the background by elves and pixies. They don't understand there's cost and effort to do it. Also, 3rd party devs were like "we have debs that work, go away".
@popey Right. I'm thinking about this purely from an end-user's POV too. Like, it's possible to make/impose changes and get people on board but you can't do that by regressing a core experience. Noble aims, though noble, don't calm people irritated that their browser is suddenly bugging out and they can't just 'use what they used before'.
@omgubuntu it’s a mistake canonical has made so many times. Introduce something before it’s ready / finished. Unity, pulse audio, shopping lens, snap …
@omgubuntu I'd say the perceived slower performance of snaps vs flatpaks drives some of the resentment. Immediately noticeable on Firefox for example, the default Web browser of the distro pushing snaps.
@sproosemoose That's absolutely played into it. Flaws were more pronounced in the early days of Snaps, making a(n even poorer) first impression. You can't tell people "we've changed your browser to a Snap - it's better" and then give them a worse experience than what they had. They see through it. It's almost, without getting too emotive about software, borderline insulting.
@omgubuntu People hate change they didn't choose.
@kaffeeringe That's basically the tl;dr of it, yeah!
@omgubuntu For such a technical change, snap packages create a lot of noise for the end user: UI elements not following customization (like my case, where I can't add Firefox to my taskbar in Kubuntu 22.04), visible folders inside $HOME, app behaviour changes after updates... All this without noticeable improvements from the user perspective, the application itself being the same as a DEB version.
@omgubuntu It's definitely that, but also snaps were pretty buggy at launch as well, launching snap Firefox took like a good 15 seconds longer than non snap
Now adays it's mostly *okay* but yeah first impressions of it have left a bad taste
flatpak is MSN
@omgubuntu There were technical reasons behind the decision to move web browsers from debs to snaps, as it greatly reduced the maintenance burden.
As a worst case, imagine the period just after an LTS release has come out, and you need to put out a Firefox security update. There's two other supported LTS releases, and the previous Ubuntu release still has a few months of support left. Each of those releases builds for about 6 architectures. That's a lot of builds to push out.
It's also possible the new version of the browser doesn't compile with the compiler in the oldest Ubuntu releases, so it may need a compiler backport to build.
With the snaps, we just need one build per architecture that will run on all releases. Further more it can easily use the libraries and compiler from a newer release as its runtime, so less need for backports.
@jamesh As I said, technical reasons aside.
@omgubuntu
Open source for me has always been about choice.
When I first moved from Windows Vista to Ubuntu 6.06 it freaked me out that there were now 5 different ways to do anything, different commands that overlapped.
Over time I grew to love not being told what to do or locked into any one tool.
Ubuntu's forcing of snaps on everybody went totally against that and is why I left for Debian.
"There are 2 things people hate: the way things are, and change." <--- 
@omgubuntu
(Well, SteamOS if that counts, basically requires flatpak for desktop apps.) I don't hate either snap nor flatpak, I just don't like either.
I agree with your statement though, I found myself wandering to Fedora but mostly for reasons of newer plasma and Wayland.
The snap Firefox update notifications/process feels pretty clumsy/dated/unnecessary though.
@omgubuntu I run Arch Linux, and Debian, they are community distros that don't force anything on me
@omgubuntu From a normie perspective (mine), I preferred Flatpaks to Snaps because they launched faster and respected the GTK theme more often.
-185 @omgubuntu My experience with snaps so far is the following:
* Stupid syntax: to update something it’s not "snap update", it’s "snap refresh". Why.
* Snap counterparts to .DEB packages have lesser quality. MuseScore? Stuck to version 2. Steam? You have to mess with the permissions in order to connect to your account, only to see that this version doesn’t handle well games stored on NTFS partitions.
@omgubuntu My main complaint against snap is that it doesn't have mirrors for stores. In China, the connection speed with the snap store is untolorable. Other than that, I think snap has a better support for cli programs, such as docker or microk8s, which is way easier to install.
If you try to use Flatpak as a developer outside of GitHub and the usual programming languages and outside of a corporation, stemming the costs, you may realize, that it is the same walled garden like the rest.
And that is, why I rant about Flatpak, technical stuff aside.
But they don't directly spit into our faces, at least. That is reason enough for many people to trust them. 
And people want to have a magical wand, which solves all our problems. "The unified Linux desktop!"
The hunt for it lets some of us forget, what we are really here for. Creating a diverse world of tools for everyone.
Not everyone at once. - That would lead to some of us left behind.
Besides that, a magical wand is worth huge risks for some, which will ruin it for many of us.
So true. If Canonical didn't make APT install snap versions of programs, uninstalling snap Firefox, and installing APT Firefox would be just another step in "10 things to do after installing Ubuntu YY.MM".
@omgubuntu