Hi,
Yesterday I was trying for (+oo)-th time Snap Store, edge channel from Software 3.38.1. Good news: fwupd seems to work. Well, it showed me an Intel ME update I’ve already installed (for whatever reason), but anyway, no error running fwupd.
Does the Ubuntu update-notifier show firmware updates? It does display some snap updates search info, but does it really do snap refresh check & update?
update-notifier doesn’t deal with firmwares no, but in an Ubuntu session snap-store is active as a service and does notify about those. It doesn’t give informations about snap updates either but autorefresh is handled automatically by snapd so unsure what you mean with ‘snap refresh check’?
(Means that update-notifier does launch a ‘snap refresh’.)
Ok, after some ‘needs info’ 
here is the point of this thread:
Imagine I’m an Ubuntnoob. I see two software sources : update-notifier and snap store. My experience with Ubuntu newcomers colleagues is that it’s very confusing.
Why not integrate ubuntu-notifier features in snap-store (somewhat like GNOME Software does, but as far as I can remember, ubuntu-notifier has more features here? Is that true?) ?
Now as an old Ubuntu user, I do not find logical to integrate firmware upgrades in snap store. Snap store is an “external” tool, core system is handled by deb repos and update-notifier. So snap store handles the last Ubuntu layer and the first one (firmwares and bios stuff).
All that looks not good to me, with all the respect to those who do work (that’s not my case!!) on these parts. “Snap Store” is handling snaps but debs & firmwares too, I can guess it’s somewhat not a good naming. And it’s somewhat odd that the location where you install a deb package does not handle its updates.
Proposal:
and
Disclaimer: I’m not here to give lessons to anybody 10000 times more Ubuntu/Linux skilled that I am, I just try to express what I do experience & feel. 
I just verified that I see “Mise à jour des snaps” (you know what it means ?) at the end of the update action of update-notifier.
So what does it really do here?
Thanks for the details, your post makes more sense now. Where you are writing ‘update notifier’ (which is a service refresh the apt index and starting the updater when needed and displaying the livepatch status) you probably mean ‘update manager’ which is the application used to apply upgrades.
Yes, the fact that the available updates are listed in different components is not by design and is confusing, it built up this way because of history and available components we could re-use.
There are discussion in upstream GNOME about moving firmware to some other places.
The snap update you mention are probably in the dist-upgrade which is the component used to upgrade a system to a new Ubuntu serie?
Oh, having vlc listed as a deb and a snap seems to be a bug in their snap which doesn’t set the common-id information in their snacraft definition. If someone is wanting to report the issue to VLC that would be an useful step to get the specific issue resolved
I just notice that this problem stands still for Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Inkscape and certainly some other apps…
The issue is that the store needs an appid to be able to merge the entries, in case of firefox upstream isn’t providing one which is reported, thunderbird is a similar situation. It’s worth reporting bugs on individual applications having the issue
Well, seems that VLC issue will be solved:
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/25300#comment:2
Great, thanks for helping getting one of those resolved!
And TB now: