14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical published a new maintenance release of Snapd, the main component of its Snappy technologies that enable Linux-based operating systems to support universal Snap apps, over the weekend, bringing support for latest proprietary Nvidia drivers.
Snapd 2.32.2 is now available to download and should be coming soon to the stable software repositories of your favorite, Snappy-enabled GNU/Linux distribution. What's exciting about this release is that it enables Snappy the use Nvidia's most recent proprietary graphics drivers in Snap apps on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and similar operating systems.
We talked with Martin Wimpress, who explained to us the change saying "The Nvidia 390 drivers, recently added to [Ubuntu] 18.04, have a very different layout than previous Nvidia drivers. So the confinement rules needed modification. Distros other than Debian and Ubuntu will install these drivers in their own respective locations."
Other than that, Snappy can now use the latest YAML parser, allow devs to grant write access to writable content slots, and immediately recompute the next refresh time when setting schedules. The Fedora 27 tests were switched to manual in Snapd 2.32.2, which no longer excludes /dev/ttymxcX serial ports and only sends authentication data if a custom Snappy store is in use.
Snappy is becoming more and more popular
Recent changes in Snapd 2.32 enable the correct creation of Vulkan directories containing Nvidia IDC files, as well as the ability to handle SIGTERM and SIGINT during early startup. In addition, Snappy will no longer confuse AppArmor with needless temporary files and provides a more robust integration test suite on core devices.
Snaps are becoming more and more popular amongst GNU/Linux distributions as they are faster to install, much safer to use, and easier to create and update. You can already use Snap apps on Arch Linux, Fedora, Linux Mint, Debian GNU/Linux, Solus, Gentoo Linux, OpenSuSE, OpenEmbedded, OpenWrt, and many other Linux-based operating systems.
Updates for Snap apps are provided automatically and transactionally by the developer of the respective application, so you won't have to rely on third-party repositories. This way, you'll always have the latest version of an app as soon as it's released upstream. Thanks to this innovative mechanism, Snap updates never break and are always secure.