Hello everyone,
Thank you so much for your help trying to solve this for me.
After I posted my issue I googled some more and found a little tidbit I hadn’t come across before.
It mentioned something about using the mount system for /root.
My /root was a symlink to /home/root. I rsync’ed the contents to another directory on another partition I removed the symlink and created a mount entry in /etc/fstab:
/data/home/root /root none rbind
Now my snaps are working.
The full thread where I got this from is here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1729576 the comment in question is #13.
Thank you again for your help.
Oh and the reason for the unusual kernel was that I had terribly garbled sound with the original kernel. I noticed that there was an update and even that is fine now.
snap update shows
snap 2.44.3+20.04
snapd 2.44.3+20.04
series 16
ubuntu 20.04
kernel 5.4.0-29-lowlatency