I did some more digging and I found that Arch starts on my Thinkpad W510 running Ubuntu 17.10 (natively) and so does when virtualized in gnome-boxes (qemu+qxl) on Fedora 26, Arch and Debian 9 (Debian Sid is not working because apparmor was recently enabled by default there and we need to adjust a few things, see this thread: Snapd 2.27.6-2 in Debian sid blocked on apparmor in kernel 4.13.0-1)
On Ubuntu 14.04 I don’t have much luck though. I’m investigating what (may) be going on there.
On Ubuntu 16.04 it works OK, since it is a a strictly confined snap whatever is causing the issue is interesting, to say the least.
I also saw some reporters say the application failed with invalid opcode, perhaps it was compiled for newer instruction set and those running with a recent-enough CPU just don’t see this?