Quote Originally Posted by monkeybrain20122 View Post
As said deb and snap are different ways to package and distribute software. deb is the standard way with shared libs and what not. snap is a beta technology, it is a container with bundled dependencies. Deb packages integrate well with the system but as you may notice the .deb packages provided by the repo are usually old. snap on the other hand is supposed to allow easy updates but right now IMO (as well as other reports on the forum) the technology still has glitches and is not mature. ppa is a way to install .deb packages and get updates (as long as the ppa is maintained) through third party repos. There are some here who don't like it, but IMO the risk is exaggerated, as long as you use well known ppas there is rarely any problem in my experience.

If you install software from the Software Centre then you may get a snap or a deb. If both snap and deb versions are available for a software then the Software Centre would give you the snap. On the other hand if you install packages with the terminal (apt) or with the synaptic package manager then you always get the .deb version. Synaptic is a gui package manager with many features (much more flexible than the Software Centre). It is not installed by default, but can be easily installed with the software centre or sudo apt install synaptic. So Software Centre doesn't use the standard repos.
Thanks, that's a great help and makes a lot of sense. I've considered installing Synaptic in the past.