So recently a new version to work with software has been installed on Ubuntu. The name is Snap.
Snap is an advanced package manager that applies container technology to run packages in isolation.
You'll learn in lesson 19 what containers are all about. What you need to remember for now is that Snap runs packages in isolation.
The packages are installed from the Ubuntu Snap Store, and that has
an option for third party software providers to offer software as well.
Now this is something that not everybody agrees on because these third party providers can even charge money for their software.
But Ubuntu wanted to provide a way to make these software solutions accessible as well.
The nice thing about Snap is that Snap packages are installed with all of the dependencies in an isolated environment.
And because while running in Snap, the package is isolated from other packages,
you can have packages that run different versions of libraries on the same
system because one package doesn't see what is required by the other package.
And even if it is very efficient, Snap applications require more
disk space and installing them is slower than using apt.
Now, some packages are only available in Snap.
One example is the Firefox browser.
Here we have a list of essential commands.
Let me just show you how it works.
Probably the best way to get started with Snap is in the Snap Store. Well, officially the name is AppCenter.
Here you can see all the Snaps that are available.
Pick whatever you want to use.
What do we see? Well, we see games and we can see so many things.
And let me check if there's a good game available.
So here we have all of these games. Do I see anything that looks interesting?
Honestly, I don't. But let's go for K Space Duel, which was
developed for kde. Now I'm curious, is that going to work in
my GNOME environment? Because KDE is a competing desktop environment.
So I'm just going to click the K space dual and
then I need to enter my password and it's installing.
While it is installing, it's taking a while. As you can see, it slowly progresses.
I'm going to have a look at what is going on in the background.
So sudo Snap tab Tab is showing all the different commands that are
available. So Snap list has a list of all the Snaps on the
system, including gnome, including the Snap Store, and so much more.
If there is a Snap that you no longer need, then you can use sudo
snap remove. Well, for now I don't have Snaps that I don't need anymore.
So let's just keep it that way.
Sudo Snap Refresh is another command that will try to update your applications.
As you can see, that starts to download all the most recent versions of your application. Oh
no, I shouldn't have been doing that because that will take some time as well. So now
we're in for a good wait, and once the wait is over we can continue.
So what do we see? We see that K Space Dual has been installed and I just have to click open to open it
and oh my goodness, look at that. That is so cool. Well, it's not cool at all because I don't know what to do.
But it runs as a Snap installed application back to the command line
where we had the sudo snap refresh and that has refreshed everything.
Now there is one tiny little thing we installed the snapd and the Snap Desktop
integration. Probably it's a good idea to restart the system before starting to use it.