14 DAY TRIAL // Today, June 23, 2016, Canonical's David Callé has proudly announced the release and general availability of Snapd 2.0.9 for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
We can confirm that Snapd 2.0.9 is indeed available for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and the update has been painless. Let's now have a look at the new features implemented so far, because even if the update comes only one week after Snapd 2.0.8, it appears that the Snappy developers have been pretty productive and managed to implement some exciting new features.
For example, the "snap interfaces" command has been updated to give users a list of all the snaps that are connected to a specific interface (please see the screenshot attached for more details), and there's now a new "snap run < app.command >" that offers you a simple and clean way to run both hooks and commands for any installed revision of a snap.
Full confinement has been enabled on elementary OS 0.4 "Loki"
One of the features promised by the Snappy developers during the release of Snapd 2.0.8 last week was full confinement for the elementary OS 0.4 "Loki" operating system, which is currently in heavy development with a Beta build out the door for public beta testers and early adopters. So now it's official, full Snap confinement landed on elementary OS 0.4.
We've had a quick chat with elementary OS' Cassidy James Blaede about this change, and he's told us that they're happy to see Snappy work on their distro. "We're happy to see official support from Canonical for Snappy on elementary OS! We're excited to see both Snappy and Flatpak evolve and are watching these new technologies closely."
Other changes implemented in Snapd 2.0.9 are support for installing Snaps in devmode by default on GNU/Linux distributions that don't yet offer full Snap confinement through AppArmor and seccomp, the ability for core Snaps to request a restart after installation, as well as support for the Rest API to send apps per Snap, thus allowing finer-grained control of Snap packages from the Software Center.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users can update to Snapd 2.0.9 as we speak. In the meantime, we would like to tell you a bit about what's coming to Snapd in future releases. For example, there will better handling of Snaps on systems with Nvidia graphics cards, and new Snap interfaces to enable additional system access for confined Snaps, including mpris, camera, or optical-drive.