I don’t know if Ubuntu has fixed it, because trying to enforce their Snap store was intentional. But I can’t say for sure because there have been years that I don’t use it.
But yeah, for anyone using it, I’d recommend to just remove Snap entirely, since it’s totally unnecessary and goes against pretty much every Linux core concept.
Or just use something like Kubuntu or Linux Mint, that have Ubuntu under hood but are more community driven instead of relying on Canonical.
Mostly avoid downloading and running packages from sources you don’t trust. And if you’re going to run something you don’t fully trust, try to run it sandboxed (like firejail or a vm, for example). Linux is generally safer than Windows because a lot of malware are created to exploit Windows weakness… also, if you use Flatpak (sepecially verified ones) or your distro package manager, you will hardly get infected.
This, AND the fact that companies usually don’t give a flying fuck for developing countries. They want to sell their services for USA and European markets, and then they just make it “available” for the rest of the word with absolutely no regard for the monetary reality of each of these countries. You can’t expect people to think it’s fair to pay 70 USD on a game, for example, or 15 USD a month on a subscription service, when this translates to 30% of a minimum wage somewhere else.
Not saying you’re wrong, but I wonder how many people that were willing to pay 250 dollars for lifetime would actually pay more than 3 years of subscription.
I believe most lifetime buyers do it for FOMO. They pay it believing that they won’t ever need to worry about it again and that they’re making a good or safe deal… but most of them won’t be using Plex that much anyway.
With this price hike Plex is basically killing the lifetime option. Sure, they might get more subscribers at first, but in the other hand they will also lose a lot of impulse buyers that will hardly pay them 250 dollars in monthly subscriptions at the long run. At least, that’s what I think…