Dang, that really sucks. I was planning on updating my desktop to 20.04 but after reading about Canonical pushing snaps and now this thread basically claiming that moving or renaming the directory is impossible because what is in my opinion a design flaw in the entire system design, I think I'll switch to Manjaro or Arch for my desktop instead.
I am on the rolling releases already but I'm not going to install an LTS version that is so deeply integrated with the distributor while at the same time ignores the directory standards so incredible blatantly.
I think the (not that bad) manual installation process might keep some folks from installing it, but it makes you learn to choose from the very beginning.
After the initial install, update it on your schedule, and install things as you decide they are needed.
Ubuntu is the opposite -- install the world, then go madly trying to disable and remove the phone-home, forced-update, bloat.
I agree, I'm using Manjaro on my laptop and it works like a treat. I have read the horror stories of a botched Arch upgrade so I think I'll stick to the slightly-more-stable Manjaro but the ecosystem itself is very nice for the moderately familiar Linux user.
I develop software that tries to target as many distros as possible, and I really don't see how Manjaro is in any way better than Arch. Botched upgrades aside, Manjaro is the only distro that couldn't produce a valid iso to boot on KVM/qemu. It has a very weird kernel config, sometimes users don't seem to have modules that are found on literally any other distro. Which is very sad because Arch just works.
In my experience the Manjaro config tends to work better on some of the hardware I've tried it on, requiring less tweaking to get it to run properly.
I'll also admit that I can't for the life of me get Arch to properly install with all the tools and features that are normally built-in to desktop environments to work on first boot. I'm sure I can make it work if I give it another try now that I've gotten more used to using Manjaro, but the Arch installation experience is not something I want to go through again any time soon.
I understand that most Arch users will want to decide exactly how they set up their system and all, but for my personal (non-work) machine I just want an operating system that works, allows me to mess with the standard Linux stuff and manages to install itself without me holding its hand. I'd much rather tick a box that says "enable full disk encryption" than manually configure cryptsetup and LUKS parameters. It's just too much effort for what I get out of it.
I am on the rolling releases already but I'm not going to install an LTS version that is so deeply integrated with the distributor while at the same time ignores the directory standards so incredible blatantly.