Ubuntu was planning to ship the CUPS printing stack as a Snap in 23.10 — but after several months of testing, its changed its mind.

Accordingly, a DEB-based printing stack will feature in Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” and in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Switching to the CUPS Snap will now aim to take place during the Ubuntu 24.10 development cycle.

  • Chewy
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    1 year ago

    Apt is still widely used, especially for system packages. Some distributions mainly rely on flatpak for gui apps and suggest containers for services (docker, podman, …) and user cli tools (distrobox).

    Snap is different and can be used for packaging anything (e.g. gui, cli, services), including the kernel and the snap daemon.

    Canonical is moving towards snaps and is expected to release a snap-only immutable Ubuntu distribution in the next year or two.

    With snap being able to install gui and system apps it does what immutable Fedora uses rpm-ostree and flatpak for.

    I personally don’t like that Canonical tries to push snap as a distro agnostic packaging sustem as it lacks features on many non-Ubuntu distros. Flatpak is especially useful for proprietary apps because of simple sandboxing or apps not packaged yet. It’s also the main way to install packages on many immutable distros. It also works on NixOS which formats like appimage don’t support by default (no fhs).