So as some of you may have heard, Snap packaging that debuted with Ubuntu 16.04 is now being put onto a ton of other distros, pretty much all the big ones.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-snap-takes-charge-of-linux-desktop-and-iot-software-distribution/
Fedora, OpenSUSE, (Manjaro?) etc. (Edit: Totally forgot that Arch Linux has it too.)
From my possibly ignorant point of view, does this negate the difference between a time based release and rolling releases? I thought a point of Snaps were to make it easier to keep your software up to date.
Of course, some distros can choose to freeze or rolling release things like the kernel, but I wonder if the difference between rolling and frozen releases will start thinning.
Kernel level stuff will most likely stay on LTS released for ease of support. But it doesn't sound like a bad idea for user space software. No reason to have to update the whole distro for a new version of Firefox.
Actually I am pretty positive over this. This should reduce fragmentation.
Commercial software vendors should love this because it removes the pain of packaging software.
1 Like
The answer is yes. It won't stop people from self configuring an Arch install with only the packages they need ( although often you still get stuff you don't want on vanilla Arch ) but it will allow for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint variations to be on a much more of a level playing field with better stability when running newer potentially unstable snaps rather than the existing model of wait 2 - 3 months to update something.
It might have a nice side effect of reducing some of the Distro elitism.