Canonical Releases Statistics Showing Adoption of Snap Packages

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.

A "snappy" result.

[Ostracus]

Docker has come far.

not many stats

[sittingnut]

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?

Re:

[fahrbot-bot]

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?

So... If I'm doing the math right, all the snaps will be installed in less than an hour, and then they're done - right?

What's next?

Re: not many stats

[Maelwryth]

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

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

Snaps? The whole thing ain't kosher. Whoever heard of a banker named Snaps?

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[xack]

And another fad packaging format will replace that. Linux has enough packaging formats, but not enough pro media apps and games without WINE.

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[Bonker]

>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.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the sweaty, unwashed, putrid scent of hipster ignorance.

Re:

[Bert64]

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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[ArchieBunker]

Give it a few releases and systemd will have some code for keeping track of dependencies like ldconfig used to.

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[ArchieBunker]

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.

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[sn0wflake]

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. O

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Anonymous Coward]

That the calculator is now a snap is unparalleled idiocy. When I first installed Bionic (where the calc is now a snap installed by default), and I first started the calc, it wouldn't start. I clicked and clicked the icon and nothing happened. I went to file a bug report but then (after a minute or so) it appeared (for each click I made).

That's when I discovered that it was a snap and that first run of a snap does a whole bunch of who know what behind the scenes which took ages. Over a minute to launch the c

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: I hate snaps

[nnull]

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!

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[bsolar]

Does the excessive mounting actually causa problems, e.g. degrading performance since it doesn't scale well?

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[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak to scaling and performance, but one thing it certainly does is create a usability issue.

When i type "mount", I can see at a glance what my system configuration is when there are 5 or 8 mounts. When the list becomes so long that it scrolls over multiple pages of console window, things are more obtuse and suddenly it's much harder to internalize what my system is doing.

And yes, for those wiseguys out there, I know about grep. That doens't address the complaint about mount-spam.

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[dremon]

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.

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[rtkluttz]

As do I. Its the lunacy of app stores coming to PC's. The OWNER of the PC controls its security, not the app developer or OS developer other than writing secure code that is hopefully open source so other people can confirm.

Still broken.

[0100010001010011]

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.

A package format so advanced

[Maelwryth]

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.

Build from sources...

[rnturn]

... 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.

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[i.r.id10t]

Eh, I can see some uses for development to be able to quickly switch versions of browsers, servers, libraries, etc. for testing purposes. And I think the snaps will have less overhead than running a full OS via VirtualBox, VMWare, etc.

But yes, I question why a calculator app would need to be containerized, unless it was done for demo purposes.

Old is new again.

[Truekaiser]

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..

Re: Old is new again.

[nnull]

This mentality still goes on.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

interesting

[Tom]

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 understo

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[nyet]

"But everything comes with its own little princess attitude, nothing is shared globally, no proper versioning..."

Exactly this. snap devs are working around the fact that the latest generation of devs are completely and utterly incompetent.

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[Anne Thwacks]

snap devs are working around the fact that the latest generation of devs are completely and utterly incompetent.

"working around" is a bit of an exaggeration. In the fullness of time, it will likely turn out that "working" was an exaggeration.

Never trust statistics

[allo]

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.

Duhhhh

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.