One of the biggest features to launch with Ubuntu 16.04 in April were snap packages. Snaps, as they are called, have now become available for distrubutions based on Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora and Gentoo. - The easy to follow installation instructions have been made available on the dedicated snapcraft website. .
Snaps bring great advantages to the Linux world, for starters, they are encapsulated from the rest of the system, making it very difficult for viruses to infect the system. Another advantage of snaps is that they are much easier to update, according to an Ubuntu Insights blog post, “developers have a much better handle on the update cycle as they can decide to bundle specific versions of a library with their app.”
Although there are advantages to snaps, they still do have issues, with a major one at the moment having to do with larger file sizes. For instance, while LibreOffice typically weighs in at around 201-238 MB (depending on platform), the snap package would weigh in at a gigantic 1.1GB. The size is likely down to all the self-contained libraries that get bundled so that it can run on any system. Still, it"s early days for snaps and will likely improve over time.
To install "snapd" (the package which lets you run snaps), head over to the snapcraft site and click on your distrubution logo for installation instructions. If you run a derivative of any of the listed distros then the instructions should work, if you are unsure it"s probably best to avoid installing it.