Please, take a look at the figures.
These 44 apps have been selected from various lists on the internet, and some that I use (Xonotic and Pulsar) have also been added.
List of apps
Symbols:
1 - newer
0 - not newer/unavailable
! - available only here
Android Studio 1/0
Audacious 0/0
Audacity 1/0
Blender 0/0
Chromium 0/0
Clementine 1/0
Digikam 0/0
Discord 0/0
Element 1/0
Evolution !/0
Firefox 0/0
Flameshot 0/0
GIMP 1/0
Handbrake 1/0
Inkscape 1/0
Itelij IDEA 0/0
Kdenlive 1/0
Keepassxc 0/0
Kodi 0/0
Krita 0/0
LMMS !/0
Libreoffice 0/0
MailSpring 0/1
OBS Studio 1/0
Okular 1/0
Openshot 0/0
Pidgin !/0
Plex desktop 0/0
Pulsar !/0
PyCharm 0/0
Qtcreator 0/1
Signal 1/0
Simplenote 1/0
Skype 0/1
Slack 0/0
Spotify 0/0
Steam 1/0
Sublime Text 0/1
Telegram 0/1
Thunderbird 0/0
VLC 0/0
VS Code 0/0
WPS Office 1/0
Xonotic 1/0
All information was checked through Snap Store and Flathub, the list was formed on the basis of this and this page.
Of the 44 applications Snap Store delivers with a probability of about 50% an outdated package/does not have it at all.
At the same time, in the case of flatpak, if the user encounters outdated software, it is rather an exception. And the software that is newer in snap is not much newer than that in flatpak.
I can continue to bring applications from GNOME Circle or some web browsers (Vivaldi, Edge, Librewolf), which simply do not exist on snap (or outdated), but I decided not to add them.
Also note that even official individual vendors (such as Inkscape) may still lag behind in publishing their applications in snap format.
If this is an insignificant indicator for you or not an indicator at all, then I ask everyone who reads this to check both this list and any software you need to make sure how much my arguments (and not only mine) about the popularity of snaps reflect reality.
Unfortunately, we can’t find out the popularity of users of other distributions at all, but according to Steam statistics, popularity is falling.
If we compare the indicator of November 2019 and June 2023, Ubuntu became the third after Arch Linux on Steam.
Given the rather abrupt and ambiguous actions of Canonical, as well as considering that other distributions do not stand still (for example, Fedora), well, this statistic, I now doubt which distribution is really the most popular on a desktop PC.