Which applications would you like to see made available as Snap?
That’s the question being asked by the Snapcraft community who work on the technology.
“What’s the killer app for you that you wish was a snap install away, automatically updated and always fresh?”, asks a new thread on the Snapcraft forum.
“Is there some tool you use which is ancient in the archive? Maybe you’re getting envious about a desktop app available elsewhere, but not in your distro? What about that thing in a PPA which doesn’t get updated often?”
I can name so many!
Why Snaps?
We recently wrote about some of the latest apps available as Snaps, including Atom, Worpress Desktop and Corebird. One question raised a few times in both the comments to those articles and over on Facebook was the question of why you’d want to use the Snap version instead of a PPA or an installer, or an app image, binary runtime, etc.
Snaps allow you to be lazy …you don’t need to hunt down packages, tussle with tarballs or wrestle with repos
Well, I can think of a couple.
Imagine you’ve just done a fresh install of Ubuntu. Normally, after settling in, you’d head off to various websites to download installers (likely in various different formats), then add a string of PPAs to get the latest versions of your favourite tools, clients and apps, and so on.
Snaps have the potential to change that. They let app developers package and distribute the latest versions of their software across all major Linux distributions.
You won’t need to hunt down packages, tussle with tarballs or wrestle with extraneous repos; Snaps allow you to be lazy. You can just install your Linux distro and then open Ubuntu Software (or GNOME Software, Plasma’s Discover, etc) to install the latest version of your favourite app.
There are (obviously) technical reasons why Snaps help make Linux package distribution a little more orderly and secure, but the convenience and simplicity is (in my opinion) the main lure of Snaps from an end-user perspective.
Your Snap Wishlist
You can chime in with your Snap wishlist over on the Snapcraft forums. Hitting the button below to view the thread to see what others have suggested.
If you don’t fancy creating an Snapcraft account to add your tuppence worth you can also share your Snap wishlist in the comments below, because I’m sure the stellar staff working on Snappy will somehow still see your suggestions.