I don't like or use Snap or Flatpak ..... personal choice ..... when I first installed Zorin 17.2 and I did a list in the terminal neither one showed up .... but now for some reason they both have stuff loaded on my laptop .....
I am running Cinnamon DE on Zorin but I have been for many years and never had either one show up ..... are these items now required by Zorin 17.2 .... if not I am going to look up how to delete the items pictured below .....
It's my understanding that they're included for the sake of making sure GTK themes are applied properly and nothing else. We have a number of members on the forum who dislike snap and flatpak and remove both as soon as Zorin installation finishes, so given that I don't see anything third party installed as a snap or flatpak, you should be fine to remove them, but it might cause apps not to be cosmetically themed as you'd expect.
As to how/any possible side effects I'm overlooking, I'll defer to someone who's actually done it.
I can't remember if I have tried this when I spotted it before. I suspect this is somehow related to the choice of using flatpak theming to cater for those who use flatpak applications.
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-are-not-telling-you-about-themes/
The Snap Stuff belongs to the Ubuntu 22 LTS Base form Zorin 17. I know that from Ubuntu 22 LTS directly and You can see it from the ''Publisher'' Note. There stands ''canonical''.
The Flatpaks are normal, too. These are the zorin Theme Stuff. You can see it at the Names. For Example ZorinBlue-Dark and ZorinBlue-Light. When you have set up Your System in Dark or Light Mode and choose in Zorin Appearance the blue Accent Color it relates to that.
I've been updating my Zorin OS installs regularly and never saw anything weird as far as Snaps is concerned. Flatpaks, however, are always there for the themes. It's possible and quite normal for software to download what it deems as a dependency during certain updates, so that may be it.
If you've noticed any updates that take longer than usual, that's probably when it happened.
The snap packages would not be there unless you installed some snap application. What you see are the residual support packages for whatever was once installed, but apparently later removed. I don't have any:
dmn@Tyana-vm:~$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.
snap support must have been installed in Zorin 17 by default. Otherwise, the snap command would not be recognized.
The Flatpak theme packages are there by default in case you install a Flatpak application. I have the same. Zorin has its own Flatpak repository for these themes.
First off thanks to everyone that contributed to this thread .....
I never willingly download any apts that have to be installed by either snap or flatpak but prefer to use .deb .... terminal or Synaptic but that is just my choice ......
I guess I really should have said in my op was there anything you could see that I could not delete in either snap or flatpak on my list above .....
I just used ...... sudo apt remove --purge (apt name) ..... and I discovered that you have to use snapd in order to remove snap .....
I use custom icons and themes made by board members here so removing the Zorin ones don't bother me and I use Cinnamon DE also .....
When You want remove a specific Snap, You need the Command snap remove --purge [Package]
Continuing the discussion of snap/flatpak behavior :
After fresh install of Zorin 17.2, I have noticed that Thunderbird installed from the repo freezes my computer occasionally. I re-installed it twice, and had the same effect.
I installed flatpak Thunderbird then, and it is running fine, no issues, respecting the desktop colors. But not desktop theme, if I change manually shell theme. But this is not a big issue.
Just out of curiosity, I installed snap Thunderbird, and it is too running just fine. Except that it always opens Mozilla to open a link, while I have Vivaldi as default browser.
Well, another reason to appreciate Zorin OS : you have choices and all flavors of wierd 
That is because it is a Flatpak. There are Ways to do that if You should want that. The following Article is a good Description I would say. It explains how You can do it in the Terminal or with Flatseal as a GUI:
Maybe this is because in the Repo should be ESR-Version 115.x and the Flatpak is ESR-Version 128.x
You may have accidentally installed a program via snap thanks to Ubuntu prioritising it over literally everything else, because you will use it you will like it or they'll hunt you down. They even do disgusting, scummy things like turning native packages for software you try to install manually via apt into stubs that install the snap packages instead. The first one they did this with, iirc, was Chrome. Not even the open source Chromium base project, they bait-and-switched people with actual Google Chrome. Silently. Without even telling you, never mind asking for permission.
In gnome Software, a lot of apps will have a little drop-down menu near the install button where you can pick which packaging format to use. The gnome devs are famously anti-user and so they don't actually expose the setting to change this order of preference in the GUI. You can, however, tell it to prioritise native packages via terminal commands if you want:
First, get the current order of preference:
gsettings get org.gnome.software packaging-format-preference
Using the "Try Zorin" option of the ISO, the default confguration is ['flatpak:flathub', 'flatpak', 'deb', 'snap']
Then rearrange your output and plug it back in using set, probably something like:
gsettings set org.gnome.software packaging-format-preference "['deb', 'flatpak:flathub', 'flatpak', 'snap']"
Finally, reboot.
This won't affect the apt command, though. I'm not even sure if it will bypass Canonical's scummy and fraudulent fake apt installers that just silently trick you into using their garbage snaps when you had explicitly asked for the native release in the Software store. They're already intentionally, wilfully, and maliciously circumventing user choice with apt so I would be shocked if they aren't also doing it in gnome Software somehow, but it's worth trying.
Why not use thunderbird from the mozilla site ?