I upgraded to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS recently, the first jump I’d made since 24.04, sticking to LTS releases the way I always have. Within days I was fighting AppArmor denials in my logs, snaps behaving differently to their .deb equivalents for no obvious reason, and the general low-grade friction of debugging the packaging layer instead of the software I actually wanted to run. I’d already documented one of these fights in public: getting Zoom’s camera working again on Wayland meant ripping the Snap out entirely and installing Mozilla’s own .deb instead, because the sandbox was standing between the app and the hardware and no amount of granted permissions fixed it.

There is nothing quite like the mild panic of joining a meeting only to be greeted by a void where your face should be. On the latest Ubuntu 26.04 and the 24.04 LTS (Wayland), this has become a recurring theme for anyone unfortunate enough to rely on the Zoom Snap package.

You check your settings. The camera is detected. It works perfectly in Firefox. It works in Cheese. You’ve even checked the Snap permissions and everything looks “correct”. Yet, Zoom remains a stubborn black screen.