The Ubuntu Software app store. (credit: Scott Gilbertson)

Ubuntu’s “snappy” new way of packaging applications is no longer exclusive to Ubuntu. Canonical today is announcing that snapd, the tool that allows snap packages to be installed on Ubuntu, has been ported to other Linux distributions including Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, and more.

If you have no idea what the above paragraph means, here’s a summary. Traditionally, applications for Ubuntu and similar distributions are packaged in the deb (short for Debian) format. These packages consist of the application a user wants to install plus any other dependencies (libraries, other applications, scripting, support files, and so on) that it needs in order to run. Applications often require a lot of dependencies, making things more complicated, for example when one application needs one version of another piece of software and a second application needs a different version of that other piece of software.

“Snap packages solve this problem by creating self-contained packages,” we noted in our review of Ubuntu 16.04, which brought snaps to servers and desktops. “With snap packages, applications are installed in their own container, and all the third-party applications are installed with them so there are no version conflicts. Snap packages are also smart enough to not install a package more than once, meaning applications installed via Snappy don’t take any more disk space than regular applications.”