Sigh. I'm a developer that is on early-version binaries often, and need to keep them frozen and update them manually. I shouldn't have to default to compiling from source.

Can I bypass snap entirely without major issues? I like Ubuntu, but indeed, I left Windows 10 officially due to auto-updates.

Yeah, there's no reason you have to use Snap. You can even use flatpak on Ubuntu (I've just started trying that out myself).

The Yaru developers even publish their theme on Flathub so Flatpaks look good on Ubuntu.

Try Pop!_OS. It's boils down to Ubuntu, but without snap and with better NVIDIA support.

The broken updates are what essentially forced me off of windows. Basically I get some awful untested update every 3-4 years that causes a boot loop. Happened in Vista, 7 and 10. The worst part is that the broken update stays in cache and forced updates basically brick your machine every single day until you decide to simply disable the windows update service, delete the windows update folders in hopes that this fixes the problem or reinstall the entire system hoping Microsoft removed the boot loop update.