Comment 6 for bug 1575053

Zygmunt, that's unfortunate to hear if what you are describing is a fundamental design principle of the snap ecosystem.

While I wouldn't advocate that a user customize their home environment in a way that arbitrarily goes against convention and standards, locations should at least be configurable for when there exists a good reason to do so (and in $HOME, a good reason includes "because that's how I want it"). In this case, the desire is better compliance with an established standard that has become quite popular. That's a good reason, IMO.

What happens under the snap folder is legitimately the business of snap/snapd, but where it's located in the $HOME filesystem should be configurable. If not, it should be placed somewhere that is legitimately manageable by the system and made accessible to users in a way controllable by them (or possibly the system administrator).

As an aside, your description of what basically seem to be "hard coded" paths for mounts and security policies explains a tangentially related problem I'm having with snaps - on my system I use a non-default location for $HOME, and that's messing up the 'carefully spelled out' security policies, apparently. That's a problem, because there's no guarantee that $HOME will be under /home on *nix systems, particularly on servers or genuinely multiuser systems. Though technically difficult, that possibility needs to be taken into account by the snap ecosystem.