The package formats Flatpaks and Snaps

Early Stage

Flatpack is still in development and therefore is not yet well known. The software center in Fedora 23 GNOME Software and the IDE GNOME Builder have been prepared for Flatpak. The installation of LibreOffice as a Flatpack is being tested.

Figure 5: Command overview with flatpak -h.

Grab It

Canonical's own design Snappy is a development that has its roots in the Click package format for the Ubuntu phone. This concept was used for the first time in 2014 with Snappy Ubuntu Core for the Internet of Things (IoT) and for embedded systems. From there, the developers came up with the idea of Snappy Personal, which is supposed to implement the concept for the desktop.

The idea was officially successful on the desktop for the first time starting with the release of Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus. The packages have the simple name "Snaps," and they are suitable for the parallel installation into DEB format (Figures 8-10). They likewise contain all of the software in a bundle, which is divided in the same way as Flatpaks. Additionally they offer the possibility of atomic updates by means of Delta files [7]. Canonical refers to such updates as transactional.

Figure 6: Flatpak can also be quickly installed in Ubuntu.

In the context of Ubuntu 16.04, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has often pointed to the gain in security achieved with the sandbox system. Shortly after its release, the well-known developer Matthew Garrett refuted this notion in his blog, indicating nothing would change as long as Ubuntu is still based on X11 and Mir is not yet used [8].

It is only fair to point out here that this is more of a problem with X11 than with Snappy. The fact remains however, that the gain in security will be noticed at the earliest in a year when Ubuntu sits on its own Mir display server.