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Canonical Releases Statistics Showing Adoption of Snap Packages (neowin.net)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the oh-snap dept.

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.

6 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. not many stats by sittingnut · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re: not many stats by Maelwryth · · Score: 2

      https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/1... perhaps?

      --
      I reserve the write to mangle english.
  2. I hate snaps by TimMD909 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Snaps waste space and mount a thousand unnecessary folders. Seriously, type "mount" after a few shit snaps have run. It's fucking ridiculous. Why the fuck does gnome calculator require a snap and mounting folders? It's a fucking calculator app. Next thing they'll package up bash into a snap for maximum stupidity.

    Bragging about the spread of snaps is like bragging about how you helped the spread of HIV, plague, or My Little Pony.

    1. Re: I hate snaps by nnull · · Score: 2

      Because it's the cool thing nowadays. Apples apps all have their own individual folders independent from one another so the other app can't see the other. It's so cool because then I can never find my files, or if the app developer decides to make it paywalled, I can't access my stuff! I love it!

    2. Re:I hate snaps by dremon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Snaps are read-only squashfs images and so are mounted. It's not 'thousand unnecessary folders', what are you talking about? I have installed Spotify, Slack, Freemind, Intellij and Signal, there is normally just one mount per app, sometimes I see two (for previous version). Calculator is probably an overkill but the apps I use are handy, no need to lookup for 3rd-party apt repositories and deal with dependencies and binary compatibility across distros.

  3. Lies, damn lies, and statistics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.