> But it seems to me like a functionality you'd need to implement with enforcement at the system level.
Yes, but that's also the case with the mobile operating systems. If I understand it correctly, Canonical aims for an all-snap future, but because snap apps can be isolated on current systems too, they backported the technology (it's better to have more sandboxed apps, than less).
Since ~1.5 years a special Ubuntu variant for IoT/Cloud exist, which is snap-only. One day there might be a snap-only desktop.
PS: I'm not an Ubuntu user.
> Because it's a beginner's distro and a common gateway into Linux for new users. This puts the server version(s) in a good spot for small-scale deployments (e.g. in startups and similarly-structured organizations).
Yeah. That's why it's popular with those beginners at Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation. I'll bet they've got a weensy little deployment, as one of the most trafficked sites on the internet. Just like Ebay and Netflix (another of the most trafficked sites on the internet), among the other companies mentioned in the article, and the others which aren't named in this article but have been mentioned on others. Canonical's partners page is full of heavy hitters.
I think a lot of people (on this sub) start out on Ubuntu and therefore view it as a beginner distro, so they feel the need to "progress" to something more "advanced". But Ubuntu really is a professional-quality, fully-fledged distro that doesn't have to have any training wheels. It's a good choice out of the box, and you get the same exact version that every paying customer gets for free. If you ever grow to a point where you need paid consulting or support, you can go straight to Canonical, and you won't have to change distros or migrate like you would if you were going from CentOS to RHEL.
On top of that Ubuntu Core offers a good platform for working on IoT devices, network appliances, and other hardware that needs brains in it. Dell is already supplying devices running it. And Ubuntu Core already supports a lot of low-cost boards and environments that make for easy prototyping of dedicated hardware devices.