Flatpak support is already available for the Linux OS

Aug 9, 2017 15:48 GMT  ·  By

You won't believe this, but Canonical's Snappy team announced on Wednesday that the Solus Project development team is working on bringing Snappy support to their Solus operating system.

Solus is an acclaimed, rolling release GNU/Linux distribution that's independently developed by a team of hard-working and innovative devs. This means that Solus ships with its own repositories and package management system, but to help users install more third-party apps, they are now bringing Snap support.

Snappy, the universal binary format technology developed by Canonical for their Ubuntu Linux operating system, allows users to install third-party apps that aren't available in the official repos. Snappy uses binary packages called Snaps, and it can be easily implemented in virtually any Linux OS.

Earlier this year, when the "war" between Red Hat's Flatpak and Ubuntu's Snappy universal binary format started, the Solus team decided to go with Flatpak to allow users to install third-party apps, but it now looks like they want to enable support for installing Snap packages too.

"Going to be packaging snapd (and associated tooling) for Solus and officially supporting it soon," reveals Ikey Doherty, Solus Project leader. "Integration into the Software Center will take slightly longer and will be a post-release issue. So, soon you'll be able to run and build Snaps."

Snap support coming soon to Solus

If you've ever dreamed of installing Snap packages on your Solus operating system, the wait is almost over as the wheels are in motion for implementing Snappy/Snapd/Snap support on Solus, but, for starters, you'll only be able to use the command-line to install third-party packages in the Snap format.

Unfortunately, the integration of Snappy's Snapd daemon into Solus' Software Center graphical package manager will take a while as there's a bit more work to be done to enable installation of Snap packages, but you can always rely on the good ol' terminal emulator.