Canonical introduced the Snap packages as one of the highlights of Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus. These are next-generation packages that contain both core software and dependencies themselves, but are also more secure, in part because they can be instantly updated as new versions are released by their creators. But what are the most popular snaps? Canonical today posted a list.
The list published by the company run by Mark Shuttleworth is a Top 5, but it is not a general one. There are a total of 41 distributions that use snaps and each one has a different ranking, so what they have published are the 5 most used Snap packages in 6 of the most popular Linux distributions, among which it is, of course, be otherwise, the system that gives its name to this blog.
Most popular snaps by distribution
| Arch Linux | CentOS | Debian | Fedora | Manjaro | Ubuntu |
| spotify | wecan | spotify | spotify | spotify | vlc |
| queues | lxd | lxd | vlc | queues | spotify |
| skype | microk8s | firefox | queues | slack | skype |
| discord | spotify | Next cloud | postman | discord | chromium |
| slack | helmet | pycharm-community | slack | skype | canonical-livepatch |
Considering the above lists, Canonical has drawn several conclusions:
- We like music. Spotify is on all the charts.
- We want to be in contact with our acquaintances. Skype or Slack are on 4 of the 6 lists.
- There are distributions that are used more for work, such as CentOS.
- We like browser snaps, and here you may have to see that in some distributions it is not as easy to install them as in Ubuntu, although in Ubuntu Chromium appears as one of the Snap packages preferred by its users.
- We care about security, as the interest in Livepatch shows.
But they still have to improve
This is not something Canonical says, it is a personal opinion. I use several snaps, among which are GIMP and Telegram, but not all of them offer what they promised us at first. I'm talking about updates: just as Telegram or GIMP update instantly and automatically, other snaps like Firefox take a long time to update, so much so that it gets to be in an older version for weeks.
For everything else, I do like snaps as much or more than flatpak packages, but I don't use any of the ones listed above. What snaps do you have installed on your Linux distribution?
The comparison is very interesting, although I don't like to use these packages, they are very slow and take up a lot of space. I'm old school and I prefer .deb and apt.