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

A Question on the Difference

[ytene]

In the linked article, the author seems to be making an argument that one benefit of using Snap Apps is that, particularly with LTS releases, there comes a point at which package maintainers simply stop providing "new" packages for a release which may have been generally available for two or more years.

If I understand this particular argument, the author is making a case that "snap apps" have the ability to "stay current" - something which may be relevant for software packages on fairly short release cycles, such as browsers [Firefox] or office suites [LibreOffice].

But what is not clear from this section of the article is whether snaps contain some inherent functionality that makes them more suitable for this than traditional Debian-pased .deb packages. Can anyone help clarify this, just to give the article some context please?

Thanks.

WTF is a snap app

[HeckRuler]

Presumably something that installs programs?

But hip and new and calls them apps?

Come on people, the world of tech is wide and deep. You don't have to define what Ubuntu is, but you do have to define what the hell this new thing is.

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.

Re:Snap packages are great but

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. The majority of comments seem to side on the argument, "Well, we have space, so why should we care?" You should. Always. This is the major problem that I'm seeing with people who code now vs say, 20 years ago. Oh, lets import this entire library for one function that we probably could have optimized and created our own. So what if it takes another 4MB of ram, thats nothing. Compound that by people who never close applications, or have slightly older hardware, and it becomes an enormous mess.

Just because your test platform can support something, doesn't mean people who may adopt your solution can.

How about this? Write your code in the most efficient way possible. Eliminate cruft, and just take pride in what you do. I understand that big business cares more about time to release than efficiency, but do your part. I first installed linux on a machine with 4MB ram (upgraded to 8 soon after). Now I'm pretty sure GRUB uses more than that.