Ubuntu was planning to ship the CUPS printing stack as a Snap in 23.10 — but after several months of testing, its changed its mind.
Accordingly, a DEB-based printing stack will feature in Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” and in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Switching to the CUPS Snap will now aim to take place during the Ubuntu 24.10 development cycle.
For end users, it seems like everybody is mostly content with all the options available except Snap.
Snaps are generally slow, use more bandwidth on updates, and tend to be inconveniently restrictive for security purposes. It just makes way more sense to use apt for anything that isn’t gaming-related.