14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Zygmunt Krynicki and Michael Vogt have announced the debut of snapd 2.0.5, the fifth maintenance release in the stable 2.0 series of the Snappy daemon for Ubuntu Linux.
Canonical doesn't give up on its new technologies, and Snaps might just become popular sooner than you might think. We've already told you that packaging your application as a Snap is not difficult and that anyone can create Snaps on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which comes with Snap integration by default.
So to further advance the adoption of Snaps on the Ubuntu Desktop and Server, Canonical has recently changed the release cycle of the snapd daemon to get a new maintenance build every week. "You can expect a steady stream of fresh snappy goodness in both snapd and in the store," says Zygmunt Krynicki, Canonical Hardware Certification team.
In the same manner, Canonical also plans on changing the version scheme for future snapd releases, from the current 2.0.x release name to a date-based one, such as 2016W22 or 2016W23. And it looks like not only the version number will change but also snapd's capabilities.
Among these, we can mention multiple OpenGL improvements, which should allow developers to deliver their games as Snaps to the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or later operating system, as well as better PulseAudio sound server integration, allowing apps to play sound and music.
Here's what's new in snapd 2.0.5
snapd 2.0.5 is not an impressive release, but it improves the Snap integration for the Unity 7 desktop environment on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) in a sense that it adds support for FreeDesktop, KDE, and D-Bus Menu notifications. Of course, there are also the usual core improvements that should make the whole Snappy experience much better.
Below, we've attached the upstream changelog of the snapd 2.0.5 release, so feel free to take a look if you're curious to know what exactly has been changed. In the meantime, you can update your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system to snapd 2.0.5 right now by running the Software Update utility, the Ubuntu Software package manager, or APT from the command-line. Happy Snapping!