Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Could Come with Snap Apps Preinstalled (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' could ship with Snap apps installed by default. From a report: A proposal from Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek suggests that Snapcraft now stand as a 'first-class' alternative to traditional packages, making them ripe for inclusion. "As more software becomes available as snaps, we want to take advantage of this body of packages as part of the default Ubuntu experience," he writes. As part of his proposal -- which is just a suggestion for the moment, so don't get excited/angry -- Langasek wants to iron out policy and rules around seeded snap app. This is to ensure they are updated and maintained accordingly, inline with Ubuntu practice. While Snaps by default would be something of a first for the regular version Ubuntu, it wouldn't be a first in general. That honour goes to Ubuntu MATE 17.10, the first distro to ship with a preinstalled Snap app.

Comments

Snap packages are great but

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

They're humongous and completely inefficient. Case in point, vlc:

As a Debian package (assuming you have the other libs of course):

$ apt-cache show vlc | grep Installed-Size
Installed-Size: 4828 (4.7M)

As a Snap package:

$ du -ch /snap/vlc/current/ | grep total
771M total

Snap packages have no dependendy problems, can be installed on any platform, are dead easy to maintain and very easy and safe to install/uninstall.

BUT! They start much slower, waste a LOT more disk space and a LOT of memory - since each Snap package is self-contained, and each package has different libraries that need to be loaded.

I use Snap packages to try out software easily, or to install a testing version of some software on a stable machine without messing up all my libraries (in the case of vlc, to use the version that plays Youtube videos correctly, since the stable Debian version is hopelessly outdated). But really, having 3 of 4 of them in an otherwise normal, lean install is as much as I'm willing to put up with.

An entire distro distributed as Snap package is plain suicidal.