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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Bring Snap Packages For Up-To-Date, More Secure Apps (neowin.net)
An anonymous reader points us to a report on Neowin: Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, has announced that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Long Term Support) will come with support for the snap packaging format and tools. As a result, end users will get more up-to-date apps, something that proved tricky in the past due âoethe complexity of packaging and providing updates,â which prevented updates to some apps being delivered. Snaps will make the Ubuntu platform more unified, developers will more easily be able to create software for PC, Server, Mobile, or IoT devices. The other major benefit of snaps is that that they're more secure than software installed through deb packages. Snaps are isolated from the rest of the system, meaning that malware packaged with a snap won't be able to affect your Ubuntu installation.
Well I hope that open source packages won't switch to the new snap system, as of course it adds duplication, and now many application providers have to update one of their libraries only because of some badlock vuln or something. Some app store owners try to counter this by threatening app owners to take down their apps if they don't update the libraries. But this only gets the biggest libraries and those with most light shined on them, the small library might never get updated.
Yes, poettering has seen correctly that the duplication can be fought with fs level dedup like btrfs is doing it, but that still doesn't solve the update problem.
Where the snap system shines at is closed source applications and open source applications which both get shipped outside of the distro's packaging system: if adopted by all distros, you can ship cross-distro binaries without having to bother about some distro's settings for their libraries.
And closed source applications is one of the areas the linux desktop sucks at. There are almost no linux versions of many more or less popular closed sourced applications.