It's A Long Road Ahead To Get Ubuntu Snappy On The Desktop

[Luke]

Package Conversion might be simple

They will be Ubuntu-only if only Ubuntu chooses to use them. But unlike other package systems like deb and rpm, Snaps doesn't cause any conflicts, so there's nothing preventing other distros from adding support. The package system itself is very easy to use, both as a user and as a packager and of course, one big benefit is that they won't necessarily require root and included scripts certainly won't. To my knowledge, the Snappy system itself doesn't have any dependencies that should make it difficult to support them.

You can also easily convert packages from other systems to Snappy, but it might be more difficult to convert snaps to other systems, because snaps doesn't rely on any particular structure. That is to say; manual conversion should be easy, but automated conversion will probably be difficult.

This looks like snappy packages should be easy to use on other distros, while packages from other distros will become hard to use on Ubuntu because they won't have their own libraries packed with them. That will become an incentive to package for Ubuntu and provide instructions for extraction to a folder in /home for any other distro. Hell the "meltytech" folks have offered kdenlive as a nightly build tarball that extracts to a folder in /home for years.

[jo-erlend]

Is this tied to Mir? or can this work on any distro (no matter if Xorg or Wayland)?

This is very new stuff, so I'm not sure anyone actually knows. Take all of this with a grain of salt.

They say it's very important to make it friendly to other communities. And of course, we have different desktops in Ubuntu, using different display technologies, so it certainly won't be limited to Mir. And then there are third-party apps that can't even be recompiled and then you'll just have to support the display tech it uses. And since Gnome and others are moving to Wayland, it makes sense that it have to support that too. In fact, I don't think there's anything in Snappy that would make it possible to really make Mir a general requirement for Snappy. To my understanding, Mir or others should just be a framework like any other. So, hopefully, the package would just have something like "frameworks: desktop" and then it would use your current desktop. But I really don't have any idea. It doesn't exist yet, so ... That sort of thing is kind of what they'll be working on this cycle.

[dh04000]

Is this tied to Mir? or can this work on any distro (no matter if Xorg or Wayland)?

1) No.
2) Yes.

[mmstick]

Nothing stops a developer from packaging to Snappy, Deb, RPM and Arch all at the same time. Packaging requires practically zero effort, or even no effort in some cases like Arch.

[blackout23]

Finally Canonical is is tackling the big hurdles of the Linux desktop.

If snap packages don't affect the rest of the system and are shipping their own deps or depend on frameworks you should be able to install those on any distro. That would be the best thing to ever happen to Linux on the desktop.

[calc]

This looks like snappy packages should be easy to use on other distros, while packages from other distros will become hard to use on Ubuntu because they won't have their own libraries packed with them. That will become an incentive to package for Ubuntu and provide instructions for extraction to a folder in /home for any other distro. Hell the "meltytech" folks have offered kdenlive as a nightly build tarball that extracts to a folder in /home for years.

You have highlighted exactly why this is a bad thing. Shipping libraries with every app instead of properly using shared libraries will cause memory utilization to skyrocket.

[riklaunim]

You have highlighted exactly why this is a bad thing. Shipping libraries with every app instead of properly using shared libraries will cause memory utilization to skyrocket.

In general that's how Android/iOS apps work. Aside of OS SDK they come with everything they need.

[kalin]

You have highlighted exactly why this is a bad thing. Shipping libraries with every app instead of properly using shared libraries will cause memory utilization to skyrocket.

It's not so bad especially for closed source projects like games.

[jo-erlend]

This looks like snappy packages should be easy to use on other distros, while packages from other distros will become hard to use on Ubuntu because they won't have their own libraries packed with them. That will become an incentive to package for Ubuntu and provide instructions for extraction to a folder in /home for any other distro. Hell the "meltytech" folks have offered kdenlive as a nightly build tarball that extracts to a folder in /home for years.

Let's say you're in a Debian system and you have a package, helloworld.deb, that you'd like to convert as a system independent snap. This package, for some odd reason, has dependencies that you want to include in the snap. So then you do deb2snap helloworld.deb. This will give you helloworld.snap which includes helloworld.deb and all dependencies. If you don't want to include the dependencies, you'll do deb2snap -d helloworld.deb.

Doesn't exactly sound like a nightmare, does it?

[dungeon]

It's not so bad especially for closed source projects like games.

Something like this

https://www.portablelinuxgames.org