Snap packages will now be available in many Linux distributions (and in the future, perhaps in Windows)

One of the major innovations of Ubuntu 16.04 was support for snap-packages . Unlike the usual deb-packages and rpm-packages, snaps carry all dependencies. Of course, this is not the first attempt to make such packages - AppImage , Flatpak , Orbital Apps existed before the snaps . Therefore, it is predictable that the next invention of the bike from Canonical did not attract much attention this spring.

But now everything is changing: snaps are already supported.In addition to Ubuntu-based distros, Arch, Debian, and Fedora, and their support is currently being finalized at CentOS, Elementary, Gentoo, Mint, OpenSUSE, OpenWrt, and RHEL. Moreover, their support is added to any Linux distribution quite easily (it took a week to OpenWrt) and, according to Canonical founder Mark Shutlworth, can be added even to Windows, although it will have to be tricky for this.

What snaps give:

• A simple way to distribute software for Linux without having to adapt them to the zoo of distributions and package systems and laborious maintenance of the repositories (or often vain hopes for people serving the repositories of distributions)
• Ease of use on all the variety of existing and planned devices for the Internet of Things
• Easy and at the same time full and safe integration into the existing environment
• Easy to install and update server and cloud applications
• Ease of creation
• Automatic updates (to be honest, I didn’t quite understand how manageable they were, and would have liked comments on this topic)
• Increased security (snaps minimize the negative effects of possible vulnerabilities)
• Easy to publish and use stable, test and daily versions of programs
• Reduced fragmentation and, consequently, increased application coverage

At the same time, of course, snaps in no way replace package managers, but serve only as an addition to them. From my point of view, this is a very interesting and useful initiative that allows you to seamlessly use the latest software on the old stable versions of distributions (for example, on Ubuntu 12.04, official support for which will be discontinued in April of the next year). For me, the main argument in favor of Ubuntu was the ability to use PPA , but the snaps will extend this advantage to other Linux distributions.

The article is based on materials from here , from here , from here and from here .