Using Snappy Personal from Canonical to manage software

Differences

In addition to the transactional updates feature referred to previously, an important goal is security. Unlike other formats, the management scripts in Snappy Personal do not require administrators to run with root rights.

Developers are promising more security by means of integration into the software center where AppArmor serves as the security mechanism. Additionally, the packages are isolated from one another. Snappy packages have a much simpler structure than packages from other distributions because they do not define external dependencies. The Snappy package includes all required dependencies and libraries.

Forked Development

Aside from the advantages that have been described, it should be noted that the accompanying dependencies take up more space in the archives and consequently on the user's hard drive. It is still not clear whether it will be possible to reduce the space requirements by deduplication of common package components.

On one hand, Snappy is essentially a return to statically linked software programs and therefore negates 30 years of software development progress toward dynamically linked libraries. On the other hand, there is no problem in operating various versions of the same software next to one another. For other systems, this capability would require some fancy footwork. Snappy packages run on every computer, independent of the status of the remainder of the software. Snappy apps also need less time to get from the developer to the user. Because their structure is quite manageable, it is possible to use automatic tools to check consistency and add the apps as part of a rolling-release mechanism at any time to the contents of the distribution.