Snaptastic – elementary OS snap manager

by Igor Ljubuncic on 17 October 2019

An interesting aspect in the life of any technology is how it propagates. Like organisms in nature, technology follows evolutionary patterns, and sometimes, it can be difficult predicting them. But their observation can be quite telling. Case in point, Snaptastic on elementary OS.

Snaptastic is a graphical snap manager utility, available in the elementary AppCenter, designed to aid the users of this distribution in getting the software that might not be available through standard repository channels.

Installation and use

You can grab Snaptastic through AppCenter. In the background, this action will also configure the snapd service, which is not installed and enabled by default in elementary OS. Once you launch the application, you can then start managing snaps. This way, Snaptastic offers frontend functionality for elementary OS users who want applications provided in the Snap Store, not provided by default elementary OS repos, and prefer a store application that fits the elementary design ethos.

At the moment, Snaptastic requires that you manually download snap files, which could be somewhat inconvenient for users who expect a full GUI experience, but Snaptastic is a new software, and additional features are likely to be added in the future. You can download snaps in a terminal windows by running the snap download “snap name” command. Then, you can use the application’s main interface to locate and install the packages.

After a snap is installed, it will be shown in the main interface – including any available updates. If you click on any individual snap, you can start the application, manually check for updates  remove the package. Advanced settings allow you to tweak Snaptastic functionality to handle snap URL links, too.

Looking ahead

Snaptastic offers elementary OS users with an easy way to manage their snaps. There’s some functionality missing, though. For example, it would be really nice if the utility could query the Snap Store directly and allows users to search as well as install snaps without the interim manual download step. Moreover, showing screenshots and videos of applications (those that have them) would make the available software even more attractive to end users. Either way, it will be quite interesting to see how Snaptastic evolves.

If you have any comments or feedback, please join our forum for a discussion.

Photo by Mike Enerio on Unsplash.

Newsletter Signup

Related posts

What happens in the Craft team stays in the Craft team … until today

Snapcraft, Charmcraft, Rockcraft … you may have heard of these tools, but have you ever wondered how – and by who – they are developed? These tools are the intellectual and keyboard-driven product of Canonical’s Craft team. Officially, the team’s name is *Craft, and the asterisk symbol can easily be seen as a “star” (The […]

Snapcrafters: 2022 wrap-up

This article was written by Merlijn Sebrechts and Dani Llewellyn from the Snapcrafters community. ===== Last year, we officially re-launched the “Snapcrafters” initiative. We’re a community of volunteers who build and maintain unofficial snap packages. Although snaps make it easy for developers to publish their software directly to users, […]

Hold your horses, I mean snaps! New feature lets you stop snap updates, for as long as you need

One of the core aspects of the snap ecosystem is the built-in, robust auto-update mechanism. Whenever there is a snap update available in the Snap Store, the snapd service will apply it, keeping your software patched and up to date. Most of the time, this works great. In some scenarios, though, this may not be […]