During the first quarter of the year Canonical gave us some interesting figures about the popularity of its Snap packages, the universal applications hosted by the company behind Ubuntu are used through multiple distributions, and at least according to their data already installed more than 3 million snaps every month.
This time Canonical has decided to publish data on which of these snaps are most popular through different distributions, and the results make something clear: there may be important differences between distros but users eventually use almost the same tools.
The top 5 snaps according to distribution
In Canonical they used a battery of quite popular and varied distributions for their statistics: Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro and of course, Ubuntu. Just by looking at the table below, you will immediately notice the universal love for Spotify. The only other multimedia application on the list is VLC.
| LINUX ARCH | CENTOS | DEBIAN | FEDORA | MANJARO | UBUNTU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spotify | Wekan | Spotify | Spotify | Spotify | VLC |
| Code | LXD | LXD | VLC | Code | Spotify |
| Skype | Microk8s | Firefox | Code | Slack | Skype |
| Discord | Spotify | Nextcloud | Postman | Discord | Chromium |
| Slack | Helm | Pycharm Community | Slack | Skype | Canonical Livepatch |
As for communications, Slack, Discord and Skype are among the most popular in at least half of the distributions that use snaps. Tools like Code and LXD also repeat quite a lot, and browsers like Firefox and Chromium only appear at the top of the list in Debian and Ubuntu respectively.
Only CentOS has a list of snaps much more different than the rest, we can attribute this to that it is used mainly in business environments and at the head you will see more than all tools that use container technology.
These data also agree quite well with what were the most popular snaps throughout 2018, there is no doubt that Spotify is basically the most downloaded snap in any site. It would be interesting to see similar data on Flatpak packages to compare.
Via | Ubuntu Blog
