Ubuntu snap already has more than 500 packages available

Snap packages were introduced in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus as a very ambitious project that intends to solve some of the most important problems of the current package systems of Linux distributions. The number of Ubuntu Snap packages available is growing slowly but steadily and there are already more than 500 applications available for installation.

Ubuntu Snap keeps moving forward relentlessly

With the release of the stable version of Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak Canonical has communicated that there are already more than 500 Snap packages available to be installed on your operating system, of course those derived from Ubuntu 16.04 or higher such as Linux Mint 18 are also compatible with Snap at present.

Some of the latest additions to the Snap packages have been applications such as the handy VLC Media Player 3.0.0 “Veterinari”, Krita 3.0.1 drawing software, LibreOffice 5.2 office suite or Kikad 4.0.4 Electronics Design Automation (EDA). To install any of the available Snap packages we only have to execute in the terminal an order very similar to the one used to install the traditional.deb packages, an example would be:

sudo snap install vlc

With this, the system will begin to download the Snap package that we have indicated and later it will be installed in our system. One of the advantages of using the Snap packages is that the applications can be updated automatically when we open it, just as in Windows and is an important step forward in security.

Ubuntu Snap intends to become a new universal package format for GNU / Linux, with this we can always have the latest version of each program in our system and developers avoid having to package their software for each distribution.