This is all from the pov of an install of the beta. When the final release comes out I will use install it and see if it has any changes on these. But this is my intial reaction of a weeks worth of using it in my day to day in both work and play.
I will first go to the default app store. If its in there and from Ubuntu proper I will use it. Snap or deb, does not matter to me. If it's an app from a 3rd party I will first check with the developer. If they officially support a snap then I will use it. If they only officially support a flatpak I will use that. Tbh, this is how all users should use software.
Truth be told I'm not really a fan of Snaps, Flatpaks or Appimages. I like the good old fashioned debs. But I can understand the use cases for the alternative package management. Im not a fan because of the propriatary back end of Snaps. But I get why Canonical did it. To limit the amount of crappy 3rd party stores. Flatpaks while they seem to be the most popular and wide spread of the 3 they have become that what they have set out to avoid. Sure there are a couple of distros that have their own Flatpak repos, but there is essentially one Flatpak repo that most people use, Flathub. I am not a fan of centralized services of any kind. The runtime updates and most of the packages are out of control when it comes to their size and amount of updates. It's beginning to get insanely stupid to admin your own system if you have a lot of flatpaks installed. Its complete and utter bloat.
I have a 2TB external hard drive that I keep my data on. It's half full of stuff I want/need to keep at a momments notice. I also have 2 500GB internal ssd's. 1 is only 40% of stuff I use day to day for the day job. The other is my root. I ran Pop!OS (2 yrs 1 install), Dual booted ZorinOS & Pop (almost 1 yr), then Debian Bookworm/MXLinux with nearly all the apps I thought I needed to have as flatpaks on all of those distros. the root drive was never less than 30% full except for when I was only using Pop!OS. That was only down to 20%. With this install of the 24.04 beta I've kept the flapaks to minimum and using mostly snaps and debs. I am currently only using 12GB of a 500Gb drive.
Appimages are pretty much moot for me. I havent found an app that is only distributed as an Appimage that I want or need to use. So it's easy for me to ignore them.
It will substitute snaps for debs! = FALSE. You can search and install deb packages from the software store. I removed the snap Thunderbird and then searched the software store for Thunderbird and it did not return a snap package. It did show a deb package. I installed it and then ran snap list and Thunderbird was back in the snap list. But other apps I installed as deb packages it did not install snap versions. So this is a case by case situation.
Everything is a snap! = FALSE - There are only 9 snap packages installed by default. Mostly run times and 2 apps. Both from Mozilla, Firefox & Thunderbird. You can still remove snapd, including the store and run everything with Synaptic or Gnome Software.
Snaps are evil and run like shit = FALSE - I find the unofficial snaps and less popular apps are just as slow and crappy as flatpak versions.
The new software app wont install deb packages. = FALSE - search and install debs. Including the Synaptic Pacakge Manager and Gnome Software for flatpak management.
Canonical is an evil corporation = Im going to call FALSE on this as well. They are a open source company trying to make a profit. The same people who hate on Cononical also hate on Red Hat and System76. I do not think Canonical or System76 are evil at all. I think they are corporations doing the best they can to survive. Red Hat on the other hand have moved the goal posts and are owned by the enemy of open source. They are trying to walk the fence line and blatantly don't care about when they step over it. Thats going to be the downfall. You cant have it both ways and it will eventually eat them.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS includes the new 6.x Linux kernel that brings many new features.
24.04 is supported for 5 years until June 2029
Users of Ubuntu 23.10 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 24.04 soon after the release.
Users of 22.04 LTS however will be offered the automatic upgrade when 24.04.1 LTS is released, which is scheduled for the 15th of August.
The default value 28 of vm.max_map_count was increased to 1048576 which is needed for some games to run
The init system was updated to systemd v255.4
The network stack was updated to Netplan version 1.0 34.
A bunch of security improvements
The new Flutter based installer. Worked great for me and was super fast. Heres a tip: When installing (doesnt matter if it's Ubuntu or any other distro) unplug all external drives. Many installers will scan all your drives before starting the install process to present you all of your options.
All new Ubuntu App Store. While it is snap centric it does install and manage debian packages from the Ubuntu repos. This store is probably the best looking and functioning store that Ubuntu has ever had.
Gnome is updated to Gnome 46. Probably the best looking and functioning Gnome to date.
Plus a whole big old list of stuff that 99% of people who use Ubuntu Desktop don't really care about.
At the end of the day Ubuntu is a distro created by a company that needs to make a profit. Just as System76 is with Pop!OS. System76 had an issue with Gnome's direction they were taking so they set out to create their own desktop called Cosmic. Everybody fawns all over it. Canonical had an issue with package management and came up with snaps and a closed sourced back end to keep out 3rd party repos and to be able to control support requests on the various official Ubuntu flavors they required the flavors to run snaps and not flatpaks. That is somehow considered evil and reprehensible for a company to want to control the support of it's products.
It's still possible to remove snaps and replace them with debs or flatpaks entirely. Canonical did state that they plan on making an immutable version of Ubuntu with everything as a flatpak. But it would be a long ways away. Snaps are the way that Canonical has invested to differentiating Ubuntu from the rest of the world of Linux.
I've been running the beta version for almost 2 weeks now. Every day for the day job and my off work time. I have to admit that it has been probably the most stable beta version of Ubuntu I've ever used. It is taking the least amount of room on my hard drive and running with the lowest of resource usage I've had from Gnome in close to 10 yrs. I actually like it and look forward to the final release so I can install it again and see what changed from the beta. So far it seems to be back to the distro that you can just install and get things done without all the hassle.
Remember that with Linux, it's not what you use that matters. It's that you use Linux thats important.