the thing people dislike about that is that you’re silently moved from an open system to a closed-source one.

Debian’s .deb hosting is completely open and you can host your own repository from which anyone can pull packages just by adding it to the apt config. fedora, suse, arch, same thing.

only Canonical can host snaps, and they’re not telling people how the hosting works. KDE seems to upload their packages to the snap store for Neon, judging from their page.

also, crucially, canonical are not the ones doing the maintenance for those apt packages. the debian team does that.