Introducing Snap packages
While the Debian package ecosystem has served Ubuntu well for the past 20 years, it does introduce complexity to software vendors who want to publish their applications for Linux. The Snap technology was created to solve the problems we discussed earlier while also providing means to control your level of trust in the applications you use.
At the simplest level, an application’s Snap package bundles all the other dependent software, providing a complete runtime for the application. This ensures that the software functions as the vendor or developer intended, regardless of what version of Ubuntu or other Linux distribution you are using. This is incredibly important to the viability of Linux as a target for software developers. The Linux ecosystem is fragmented, and a software vendor such as Spotify doesn’t want to build its software differently for the thousands of possible Linux distributions and versions. Historically, this has been the...
