I don't believe that's true any longer. The U.S. moves over Greenland have a large part to play in this, but I think the sanctioning of the International Criminal Court is much more relevant.
Overnight ICC officials couldn't access email, documents etc, all because the U.S. government leaned on Microsoft. If they can do it to a United Nations court they can and will do it to anyone.
Spending money on a system you don't have any control over doesn't make sense. The public understand this.
Stripping the metadata on a photo is probably a feature though. For privacy reasons the default should most likely be that location, device info etc are taken out of photos that might go viral or be shared beyond what the original user intended.
I'm on Ubuntu and mostly use debs (apt), I'll use Snaps if that's the easiest way to get an update. I use Appimages for some ephemeral stuff or when that's the only way developers release it (some 3d printing stuff). I haven't installed Flatpaks at all because it doesn't jibe with the distro overall.
Ubuntu seems to dwarf other Linux distrobutions in terms of numbers of users. Are you saying more users have Flatpak installed than have Snap installed?
I don't use NixOS, or have any great interest in it tbh. But this podcast featuring Martin Wimpress (of Linux Mate and other projects) does a decent job of describing what NixOS is, and previews some ongoing and upcoming efforts to address the learning curve and lingo around it.
Overnight ICC officials couldn't access email, documents etc, all because the U.S. government leaned on Microsoft. If they can do it to a United Nations court they can and will do it to anyone.
Spending money on a system you don't have any control over doesn't make sense. The public understand this.