Top 5 Linux Snaps of 2020: Arch, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, and Ubuntu
All Linux users are the same, right? No way, José! Linux users are a diverse bunch, with differing opinions, tastes, and personalities. In fact, that is probably a contributing factor to the fragmentation of the Linux community. Linux users have lots of options between distributions, desktop environments, and more -- they are not stuck in a box like Windows 10 users.
To highlight how different Linux users can be, Canonical has released some data about the installation of Snaps, categorized by distro. It chose six of the most popular Linux-based operating systems for its analysis -- Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Arch Linux, and Manjaro. It then shared the top five most popular snaps for each distribution in 2020.
"If we look across the six distributions, we can see that people still care a great deal about communication and productivity, without compromising on entertainment. The adoption of Microsoft Visual Code is also quite telling, and it stands out among the other trends we’ve observed here. It points in the direction of greater collaboration and perhaps a need for a more common path between Windows and Linux when it comes to applications," explains Igor Ljubuncic, Canonical.
You can see the 2020 results down below, followed by the 2019 data for comparison. Spotify remains wildly popular, as people love listening to music -- no surprise there. Also expected, VLC remains a popular media player with Ubuntu users.
What does shock me, however, is Slack no longer charting in the top five for any distro. Look, we are in the middle of a pandemic, and with more people working from home, I expected Slack to be topping the lists. Microsoft must be rather disappointed to see Skype failing to take any meaningful advantage of the work-from-home explosion.
Top Five snaps per Linux distro for 2020
| Arch Linux | CentOS | Debian | Fedora | Manjaro | Ubuntu |
| spotify | certbot | certbot | spotify | spotify | vlc |
| skype | microk8s | snap-store | discord | code | code |
| discord | lxd | spotify | postman | skype | spotify |
| code | wekan | postman | anbox | zoom-client | canonical-livepatch |
| anbox | helm | code | code | discord | gimp |
Top Five snaps per Linux distro for 2019
| Arch Linux | 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 |
Are you surprised by the 2020 results? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
Image credit: Alex Gorka/Shutterstock