Does Linux Change? Canon's Mark Shuttleworth announced in June that Snaps, a new method for packing packaging, will be adopted by other distributions.
A brief story about Linux's messy mess
Unlike Windows or Mac applications, Linux applications share the same libraries throughout system and the main job of a package manager is to find the dependencies (libraries) required by the application so it can be installed.
The Linux distributions χρησιμοποιούν κυρίως σε δύο μορφές συσκευασίας: τις rpm και deb. Οι διανομές όπως το Red Hat Enterprise Linux, το SUSE Linux Enterprise, το openSUSE, Fedora και το CentOS χρησιμοποιούν πακέτα rpm, ενώ η οικογένεια του Debian, συμπεριλαμβανομένων όλων των Ubuntοειδών, Linux Mint κ.α. OS χρησιμοποιούν πακέτα deb. Φυσικά υπάρχουν πολλές άλλες διανομές που έχουν τις δικές τους μορφές συσκευασίας.
This causes three major problems for developers and Linux users:
1: Developers can not use the latest libraries that offer more features if the distribution still uses older libraries.
2: Developers have to write and maintain applications for different distributions as well as different versions of each single distribution because all distributions use different library versions.
3: Mixing in libraries leads to damaged systems, so Linux users often experience various problems.
Here comes Snaps. Is the answer the community of open-minded is looking for?
Snaps originally started as Click, a new packaging format for Ubuntu Mobile. It bundled all dependencies and libraries so developers don't have to worry about it analysis a dependency.
Later, Clicks developed into Snaps, which are targeted at servers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and computers. This April, Canonical first released Snaps with the release of Ubuntu 16.04 for the first time.
The arrival of Snaps on a desktop system immediately drew the attention of different communities and developers who began asking Canonical whether they can make it a port in their distribution.
So although Snaps was made and released for Ubuntu, Canonical in collaboration with developers from Gentoo, Fedora and Arch Linux distributions begins to create hooks for different distributions. So Snaps now works inherently in Arch, Debian, Fedora, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, GNU Ubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu.
Meanwhile, Canonical is working with other developers to validate Snaps in CentOS, Elementary, Gentoo, Mint, OpenSUSE, OpenWrt and RHEL.
What brings the future?
Imagine that with Snaps the Linux desktop will become a huge platform similar to that of MacOS and Windows. Application developers should write their application only once and run on each distribution.
The new feature in addition to the above also brings the necessary security to the Linux desktop as Snaps can be considered as a test environment, because the libraries of the package do not come into "contact" with the system.
Another advantage of Snaps is the easier and faster distribution of applications. Developers will no longer worry about which libraries each system uses, and new versions of their applications will be released as soon as possible.
But let's see what happens. To live the future we describe above the whole Linux community should drop .deb and .rpm and adopt Snaps as default packet format.
