Snaps have priority?

[TimApple]

Hey everyone…

I see snaps created for darn near everything including libreoffice. I am just wondering if snaps are going to have priority over debs? When I install 17.10 or 18.04 when it comes out, will libreoffice be the snap or .deb.

Just curious, thanks.

[willcooke]

Hi Tim,

Our intention for Ubuntu Desktop is to replace a lot of the leaf applications with Snaps in 18.04.

This gives us the ability to publish new apps to an otherwise static LTS release. I am expecting us to use tracks to keep a stable known-working-and-fully-supported track and then something a bit more cutting edge for those who want it. The best of both worlds!

We’ll need to be a bit cautious here, for example can we enable the LibreOffice Snap to be able to install it’s rich catalogue of plugins in time for the LTS? Hopefully yes.

So in answer to your question, yes we’ll be aiming for Snaps to be the mechanism of choice for 18.04.

Cheers, Will

[mohan-ram]

So will this mean for the users who opt into can stay on Firefox ESR in LTS, for other it could be regular release and/or even developer edition?

[willcooke]

The ESR version of Firefox is currently only available via a PPA. That PPA will likely still exist for 18.04 since it’s community maintained.

However, let’s consider the Snappy way of doing things… you could have a track for ESR and a track for Stable. If you want to stay on the ESR then that’s the track you would opt for, if you wanted something more up-to-date then you switch to the Stable track. If you wanted bleeding edge, you could switch to the beta or edge channel in the Stable track.

So you’d have freedom to choose the versions and switch between them as you please.

[flocculant]

Just want to check something here? What about people who’re not interested in using snaps? Cheers

[willcooke]

The archive will continue to exist. But obviously will not be as up to date as the snaps.

[flocculant]

Thanks Will - that’s what I expected to see, just wanted to be sure (Xubuntu hat on )

[Pete]

I have a question about snaps, one of the advantages of them seem to be the upstream/developer has the ability to quickly push updates. e.g. less static LTS. Compared to my understanding of the traditional repository flow, where changes are made, then pulled, tested then pushed to public consumption. (Correct me if I am wrong).

What is to stop a snap developer from pushing untested changes to a stable track. Is there a review stage like there would be in the traditional package life cycle?

Hope that makes some sense.
Pete

[willcooke]

For packages which are considered core to the desktop, Canonical will support those in the same way we support the current deb versions. So we will QA, maintain and update.

[Alculete]

Actually, snaps are pretty cool. My only concern is the plugs that have to be done on CLI for some apps to work. I think the plugs on apps should be made automatically

[willcooke]

That is indeed the idea. Slots can be made to auto-connect and that will be tidied up and sorted out for 18.04. We’re also working on some UI in GNOME Software to make it easier to manually connect as well.

[treb0r]

Apologies if this is slightly off topic, but having tested some GUI apps using an earlier iteration of snaps, one of the obvious problems was that the look and feel of the app did not correctly match that of the active Gnome theme. I saw this mentioned somewhere but I just wondered if anyone has looked at a way of solving this.

[willcooke]

Yes, we’re working on a solution to this right now. There is a thread over on the snapcraft.io forums which has some more detail:

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/use-the-system-gtk-theme/496

[KristijanZic]

Is Canonical going to maintain those snaps or will you try to work with upstreams to do it.

I don’t see much use of snaps if it’s only going to be used by Canonical to maintain a few core apps for Ubuntu and not be used by the upstreams and other projects and package maintainers.

One issue that I see is the talk that snaps are very easy to package but I see developers dropping snap support like kdenlive. Maybe some in depth snap and snapcraft video tutorials should be published on ubuntu on air?
https://kdenlive.org/download/

What are you doing to solve that issue that is not specifically a technical one in nature? I don’t see a real adoption as of yet.

Also, I see that many are opting to package their apps as an appimage. It’s really surprising considering there is literally no talk going around them comparing to snaps and flatpak which are all over the place.

[balloons]

@KristijanZic I think your questions are better understood by checking out https://forum.snapcraft.io. The ideal scenario in my mind is for upstreams to control their snaps themselves – it just makes sense. I believe this is already happening.