Get to know the ubuntu snap packages and their advantages

One of the great novelties of Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus are the Snap packages that you have probably already read before entering this post. What are Snap packages and what are their advantages?

Before continuing with the Snap packages, we should review the operation of GNU / Linux and Ubuntu in particular in terms of software management.

How do we handle the software in Ubuntu?

If you have ever used Ubuntu or another GNU / Linux distribution, you may have noticed that its way of installing and uninstalling software is very different from Windows. On GNU / Linux the package structure software and these packages are available in the repositories for download.

We can define a repository as a set of classified packages that contain all the elements that are needed to install a certain program on the system, for example wmaker or one better known as the VLC media player. The installation of a certain program may require a single package or several of them.

In the case of Ubuntu in particular we have several options to manage the.deb packages available in the repositories and installed on our system, although all of them make use of the apt tool set (from English A dvanced P ackage T ool) created by Debian at the time (Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian).

Command console: using the console is the method preferred by the most advanced users when managing software in Ubuntu due to its great versatility and speed.

To install a program from the command console we must indicate the following order:

sudo apt-get install "package name"

An example would be the following:

sudo apt-get install wmaker

To uninstall it we just have to change the word install to remove:

sudo apt-get remove wmaker

Then the system will ask us for our user code and immediately begin to download and install all the packages necessary for the installation of our program. In this case it is very simple because the program has the same name as the package that we must download (wmaker) so we have no problem. However, many times the program name does not match the package name and then we have a problem, we may also need to download more than one package manually.

Synaptic: synaptic is another great tool created by Debian for software management. Synaptic is nothing more than a graphical interface to use apt in a much simpler and friendlier way, with it we can search for the different packages to install / uninstall in a graphical way.

Ubuntu Software Center: The Ubuntu Software Center is a new graphical interface created by Canonical to further simplify the use of apt and make it easier for less experienced users. It is an interface in which the different programs and packages available for installation appear, classified by categories.

Gdebi: This is another graphical tool that makes use of apt for the installation of packages in Ubuntu and that was also created by Debian. In this case, it allows us to install packages on our system that we have downloaded from another computer or those that we have been able to download from our own computer. Gdebi will take care of downloading the rest of the possible packages that may be necessary

Compilation of binaries: there is a much more advanced and complex last option that consists of downloading the source code (if available) and compiling it manually for our system. With this we get that the programs are adapted to the maximum to the characteristics of our PC for better performance.

The management of the software in GNU / Linux in the form of repositories and packages has a series of important advantages for the users, on the one hand those responsible for the distribution can check the correct operation and security of all the system files and also, we It allows updating all the installed software with a couple of clicks or a single command in the terminal.

Repository limitations and benefits of Snap packages

As we have mentioned before, the installation of a certain program may require a single package or several of them, this last case is what is known as dependencies and can (in fact it does) cause several important problems.

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The first is that it may be the case that we continue to use a relatively old version of Ubuntu and want to install the latest version of a certain program. In this situation it may be the case that one of the dependencies of the program that we want to install is not available in the repositories available for our version of Ubuntu, in this case we simply could not install our beloved program, or we would have to resort to much more methods advanced and complex to solve the problem with dependencies.

The other big problem mainly affects computers that do not have an internet connection, in this case it is impossible or really very complicated to manually download all the necessary packages from another computer and then install them on ours.

Given these problems, the Snap packages that are available in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS are born, they contain all the files and all the dependencies to install a certain program, we can say that it is a solution similar to that of Windows in that with a single file we can install a Program. These Snap packages are born from inspiration in mobile operating systems, for example Android where we can download an apk file and then transfer it to our smartphone or tablet and install the application in question in a very simple way.

At this point it is important to note that the applications installed through Snap packages will remain isolated from the rest of the system, an important point to guarantee security since the files contained in these packages will not be watched or controlled by Canonical. In this way, if a Snap package presents a file with a security hole, it will not affect the rest of the system but only its own program, let's not forget that GNU / Linux is an operating system that is characterized by offering great security to the user.