You are making my point, the "trust" is not the issue , the issue is "control". Canonical has the control on the snap store and Mint can insert their customization on top.

Again, if Canonical is evil and can't be trusted why I would run Mint? Do the developers run any scripts to alert me if Canonical slips some bad thing in a binary?

I think is fine if they remove snaps but IMO is stupid to accuse Canonical to be evil and not trustworthy while you blindly trust their repos.

> * Nonfree software is generally demarcated as such. There is nonfree software that has available source (in the case of some codecs), other that comes as blobs.

This is the same in apt as it is in the Snap Store. Compare https://snapcraft.io/chromium to https://snapcraft.io/spotify for example: the license field is clearly presented there.

> * The Chromium package is open source, and in most distros comes as binary built from the toolchain set up by the package maintainers. In all free software distros if you don't want to download the binary, you can download the source and build locally with the provided build scripts (in the case of most APT packages in Debian/ubuntu).

Also true for the Chromium snap (see next item for details).

> * Serving Chromium binaries with Snap removes the option of downloading, inspecting, and running the build chain locally

This is outright false. The Snap Store page for Chromium is available here: https://snapcraft.io/chromium. It links to the source, which is the git repository here: https://code.launchpad.net/~chromium-team/chromium-browser/+.... You can use these source together with snapcraft (which is Free Software, licensed under GPL-3.0) to download, inspect and run the build chain locally, including with any modifications that you want to make. You'll get a snap package as output, which you are free to distribute and other users can install it using the snap CLI.

> * Serving a different version of Chromium, or replacing the stock version with a different variety, cannot be done without creating a new Snap repository.

Partly false. You can ship a different version of Chromium in the Snap Store under a different name. This is an automated process, rather like creating a PPA. As long as you aren't misleading anyone and you follow the terms of the relevant licenses[1], nobody will stop you.

> * Because there is no open source Snap repository software, Mint is unable to set up an alternative repo that could work around some of the objections they have with Ubuntu.

Partly correct. One generally cited reason for this is that the same criticism was leveled at Launchpad which was opened in response - but nobody is running an alternative production of Launchpad anywhere so Canonical doesn't want to waste that sort of effort again. Another is that store fragmentation is bad. I'm just stating the other side's position here. Please don't shoot the messenger.

[1] Chromium's licenses are listed as: Apache-2.0 AND BSD-3-Clause AND LGPL-2.0 AND LGPL-2.1 AND MIT AND MS-PL AND (GPL-2.0+ OR LGPL-2.1+ OR MPL-1.1)

Mirrors are just mirrors, they are not build farms that build from source.

I would convert the next sentence in math logic and prove you that it makes no sense but not sure you can understand the symbols so let me try again in English.

1 Mint does not trust Canonical

2 Mint plugs their users systems directly to Canonical untrustworthy repos to run possible "evil" binaries and scripts as root.

if 1 and 2 are true then as a user you should not use Mint, as a Mint developer you should start working and finally create an independent distribution.

IMO 1 is false, probably they mentioning "trust" was a mistake.