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Canonical Releases Statistics Showing Adoption of Snap Packages (neowin.net)
Canonical is applauding what it calls "exceptional adoption" of snaps -- and has shared some new statistics about its whole "Snappy" software deployment and package management system. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this article from Neowin:
snaps are seeing 100,000 installs every day on cloud, server, container, desktop and on IoT devices, which works out to around three million installs each month. Of course, these statistics don't only take into account snap installs on Ubuntu, but other distributions too. Canonical said that snaps are supported on 41 Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Fedora, and many more...
Snap packages first launched alongside Ubuntu 16.04 which was released in 2016. They have several benefits over typical Linux packages, for example, their dependencies are bundled into the package making them easy to install, they get automatic updates and can be rolled back by the maintainer if issues arise, and they're sandboxed, giving the user more security.
Snap packages first launched alongside Ubuntu 16.04 which was released in 2016. They have several benefits over typical Linux packages, for example, their dependencies are bundled into the package making them easy to install, they get automatic updates and can be rolled back by the maintainer if issues arise, and they're sandboxed, giving the user more security.
Docker has come far.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
apart from there being 4100 snaps, and there are 100,000( and growing) installs per day, there aren't any stats as far as i can see.
did i miss a link?
And another fad packaging format will replace that. Linux has enough packaging formats, but not enough pro media apps and games without WINE.
Bragging about the spread of snaps is like bragging about how you helped the spread of HIV, plague, or My Little Pony.
You're missing the sweaty, unwashed, putrid scent of hipster ignorance.
A lot of modern libraries are no longer able to be statically linked... Trying to build static binaries these days can be pretty difficult for anything non trivial.
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I have my $HOME on another partition and snaps don't work. Something something about permissions and I haven't dug any deeper than that.
Congratulations on linux implementing the .app setup from OS X.
They forgot to put a . in frount of the folder. I wonder if these statistics include snaps included in Ubuntu installs. 100,000 per day seriously sounds like a bullshit number.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
... or switch to Slackware. Call me Old School but if snaps are the solution to your application installation problems, maybe you should stick to using your smartphone for your computing needs and just use the application store.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I remember the days of windows 3.11 where every application had to have everything it needed in it's own folder to work. As a result you have half a dozen or more versions of the same library. Eating up space. Providing a nightmare for bug fixes..
How many of these 100k installs per day are due to ubuntu installing a number of snaps by default? As of 18.04, parts of gnome are now snaps and installed by default. So that's at least 3-4 snaps, meaning statistically out of those 100k those come from 25k daily ubuntu installations. And how many of those are automated provisions that are actually removing snaps post installations.
Canonical is blowing its own trumpet with some hot air.
Linux is so splintered with a million libraries for everything under the sun. Eventually you'll need a program and find it uses some obscure library that nobody has packages for and that library won't compile without a dozen other obscure dependencies. Meanwhile Linux users used to complain over "dll hell" while touting their source code.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Give it a few releases and systemd will have some code for keeping track of dependencies like ldconfig used to.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I didn't know about "Snaps" and read the comments to figure out what it is. Then I laughed.
There used to be a dependencies problem in Linux. Then package managers solved it, and quite well actually. Very rarely some obscure software needs some specific version of some unusual library and you need to compile it yourself. Ok, not a big problem, thanks to proper versioning Linux can have several versions of the same library installed at the same time.
Then I went back into we development a little and I understood. Everything there, especially the abomination called node.js, was dependeny hell. There are kind-of-but-not-really package managers, well basically just reinventions of the 20 year old Makefile concept, and they just-about-most-of-the-time work. But everything comes with its own little princess attitude, nothing is shared globally, no proper versioning...
Of course, if you live in that environment, you come up with an idea like "Snaps" and think you just invented sliced bread.
I might have been dealing with computers for too long, but I fill like some of the old guys who sometimes write articles where they look at todays computing world and essentially say "come on kids, that is what you got? We had that in the 80s."
Next thing, someone will write "Snap Manager" and "Snap Global Library Storage" (probably with snappier names, pun not intended, and ending in consonant-r something) and we're finally full circle.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Package formats was my breaking point. Back in 2015 I gave Linux one final chance and decided to install Fedora because it was the system that had the best hardware support at the time according to articles. Installed it... it wanted a driver for my Intel RAID card... A card that worked out of the box since Windows Vista. Yet still 5+ years later Linux still didn't support it... *deep sigh* Fine, I downloaded the official Intel driver for Linux and tried searching for the driver. Couldn't find any driver. Odd because I knew it was on the USB stick because I had just downloaded it. It took me a minute or two to realize it was in the wrong package format... because it's f-cking Linux... because who doesn't need a billion install formats? Why make things simple? I just rolled my eyes and mumbled "f-ck this shit" and installed Windows 10 instead without any problems at all. This is why Linux is such a f-cking joke. Nothing is easy, nothing makes sense, everything has to be a million times harder than they need to. F-ck Linux.
Users do not choose snap packages, ubuntu mixes them into the normal programs offered in its graphical package installer. Users do not know, that they are installing snap packages.
Would it be too much to ask for a brief summary or explanation of what a "snap" is for people who aren't familiar with this technology? From what I can see, it's like Docker containers, but how are "snaps" different? Perusing the "snap" site didn't make it any clearer.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
>but not enough pro media apps and games without WINE.
I couldn't really comment about the media apps. It seems like we've got a fairly nice selection of multimedia producers and photography workers - Darktable, etc... but I've not been doing a lot of media work lately.
However, the Linux gaming environment has changed dramatically over the last 3-5 years. Aside from the games that run well under WINE (WoWarcraft is a good example) There is a now a huge selection of Linux-native games on Steam and gog.com.
Frequently the 4A studios give Linux a miss. However, Steam has dramatically cut that number. The 'SteamOS + Linux' category has grown just as dramatically.
GoG focuses on bringing older and niche games to players that would otherwise miss them. There is a very wide selection of Linux games available on GoG.
Many, if not most, indie game devs want their games to be available to as wide an audience as possible, so frequently develop with Linux and/or Android in mind. For example, I'm currently playing 'Terraria'. Small dev team. 29th most popular game ever-- Linux native install with some help from Mono.
Now, in addition all to that, let's go back to WINE. Steam has, in the last few weeks, begun testing 'SteamPlay', which uses a custom build of WINE called 'Proton' that runs underneath steam to run some previously Windows-only titles with fantastic quality. In the last week or so, I've been able to run some games I loved, but abandoned along with Windows like 'MagicMaker' and 'PixelJunk Eden'. Steam is giving back to WINE, which just released a new version.
It's worth noting that the Java version of Minecraft has always worked on Linux and Fortnite apparently plays very well under Wine.
Right now, Linux gaming is in a period of Renaissance. If you've despaired of gaming on Linux, it might be time to give it another look.
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