14 DAY TRIAL // Developers from Canonical explained last week that they intended to rebase the Ubuntu Next flavor (featuring Mir and Unity8) on Snappy, which means that they were also considering moving to a rolling release model, even if it was just for this branch.
Will Cooke from Canonical said last week that the current .deb based Desktop Next image would be going away and would be replaced with the new Snappy version. This is all well and good, but it does raise a few questions. For example, what will happen with the regular Ubuntu desktop image, which is still using .deb packages? Ubuntu devs went to Reddit and explained a lot of this stuff, but the bottom line is that some things will be decided at the Ubuntu Online Summit that starts tomorrow, May 5.
One of the things said by the Ubuntu devs on Reddit was that the .deb based Ubuntu version is not going anywhere, and it will coexist, at least for the foreseeable future, with the Snappy version. Now, remember that Canonical plans to have Unity 8 and Mir ready in time for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, so that is probably the first stable image that will be based on Snappy. Also, if we take a look at how the Ubuntu Touch is being handled and released, we can surmise that the Ubuntu desktop is going in the same direction.
Snappy is more than just another package
Snappy packages are the evolution of the old click packages. Basically, you can get an app, like Pidgin, for example, bundle it with all the required libraries and components, and install it on any distro that supports Snappy packages. Users should no longer care if they have the required libraries in the system or the repositories. It should just work.
Also, each application is installed in a sandbox, just like on the phone, which means that users won't be able to affect the operating system with their installations. This can be extended to core components and it opens up some interesting features. For example, if Ubuntu devs push a new updated package through the official repos and that package causes a regression, they can just roll back the changes without affecting anything else in the system.
In any case, if we take a closer look at the Ubuntu Touch system, we'll see that it's actually following a rolling release model. If the Ubuntu Next flavor is going the same way, there won't be a reason to have a periodical release from Canonical, with the exception of images with regenerated packages. Also, I spoke with one of the Ubuntu devs, and he confirmed the fact that this was the direction of the project.
Canonical was discussing a couple of years back whether they should change to a rolling release model, but they decided against it. Now, they are going to do it anyway, and it will most likely be a seamless transition.