It was introduced a bit earlier than 16.04LTS, but the desktop support really came a bit later than that LTS release (around the time of the point release).

I have been using it since then, but then again I am one of the developers of snapcraft.

Regardless of my affiliation I really appreciate having a base system that is relatively static and have my apps just roll, and if you don't want to roll too far, you can stick to a major release if the publisher of the snap provides a channel with a track you can subscribe to (instead of following the default track, `latest`). If things go ad, you can always revert, which is a big plus from my perspective as it is clean and per snap.

What was wrong with Synaptic?

I always felt the the offical Ubuntu package manager was a dumbed down version that(though its been a while sine I have used Ubuntu). Synaptic definitely felt better for installing libraries instead of applications.

> What was wrong with Synaptic?

Once an Ubuntu release has been cut the debs within it can (for the most part) only receive bugfixes, not new features. Which means that as an LTS goes through its lifespan, the software within it slowly gets further and further out of date. Snaps, on the other hand, are as up-to-date as their publishers make them.

> What was wrong with Synaptic?

>> broken dependencies.

Not that it's Synaptic's fault, but some packages will have conflicting dependencies, especially if you're using PPA's to get recent software versions. It's not uncommon to get "foo (latest) requires bar >=3.1 but you have bar 2.8 installed. Baz (installed) requires bar 2.8". Snaps avoid conflicts by having each app contain it's dependencies, which could otherwise conflict.

> Snaps avoid conflicts by having each app contain it's dependencies, which could otherwise conflict.

It also negates the entire point of having a package management system, as you can’t upgrade a security issue in libfoo and get it fixed once, but have to wait for all the users of libfoo, and the users of users of libfoo, and so on, to provide a new version of the Snap package with a new fixed libfoo contained inside it.

I work for Canonical, but I also share maintainership of some snaps. From an automatic email I received recently: “A scan of this snap shows that it was built with packages from the Ubuntu archive that have since received security updates. The following lists new USNs for affected binary packages in each snap revision: … Simply rebuilding the snap will pull in the new security updates and resolve this. If your snap also contains vendored code, now might be a good time to review it for any needed updates.“

Yes, you don’t get that library update everywhere all at once, but this gives each vendor a chance to make sure that update actually works with their app.

Huh, so basically Windows had it right this whole time?