The difference between the two versions of Inkscape in Ubuntu repos

Question

I am one of the hobos who don't understand the answer Ubuntu community gives to why there is 2 versions of Inkscape in the Ubuntu repos. I would like to understand the reason. I have used Inkscape several years, and before that used Corel Draw in 15 years, and there might be something I am missing when using one version of Inkscape instead on the other. Please do not just tell me that one of them has a SNAP, and that it is up to me to decide. Decide what, that is the problem. Thank you very much, if I could be enlightned. Sincerely yours, Carl-Georg Madelung

Answer 1

The deb packages available for each release can be seen with

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=all&searchon=names&keywords=inkscape

where note only one for each release

Snap packages you can have a version installed from each channel (so multiple snaps available is to be expected). Three are available I note

https://snapcraft.io/inkscape

Snap & deb packaged versions are to be expected for some programs (not all though)

Answer 2

apt is the official/standard package system for Ubuntu and Debian.

While snap is an effort to achieve "one package to run on all systems". To achieve this goal, snap has it own library dependencies, application permissions and does some virtualizations.

There will be some notable differences for a normal user:

1. Ubuntu freezes application versions after each releases. It will not update major version of applications, only addresses security issues or serious bugs.

   But snap is not part of Ubuntu, it develops independently apart from Ubuntu. So no matter in which Linux releases, you have same version snap software.

   If you use Ubuntu Current release, it updates every 6 months, the versions will not differs much.

   But if you use LTS, for example 16.04, after years now the versions in apt and snap could be whole lot different, and you might want to give snap a try.

2. Since snap has it's own dependencies, the place of configuration files are different from standard deb versions. The behavior of gnome will be different too. You could find slight differences here and there.

3. You will need to remember some snap permissions you need to tweak. For example a snap package cannot access files outside home by default, you need to enable it manually.

Though snap is still young and has way to go, Canonical is promoting snap now and start to put many packages default on snap. I guess it will improve over time.

Answer 3

As it looks here (are we talking about 18.04?), the Snap package is the development version and the 'normal' version the stable version.

If you do not need fancy features, let me assume the stable version suits you.