Installing snap on Lubuntu

If you’re running Lubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), you don’t need to do anything. Snap is already installed and ready to go.

If you need to know which version of Lubuntu you’re running (except on 18.10), open the System Profiler from the System Tools desktop launch menu. Click on Summary and look for Operating System. Alternatively, from the command line, type lsb_release -a.

Versions of Lubuntu between 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and Lubuntu 18.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) don’t include snap by default, but snap can be installed from the Synaptic Package Manager (rather than the Lubuntu Software Centre) by searching for snapd (make sure your distro is up-to-date first).

Alternatively, snapd can be installed from the command line:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install snapd

Either log out and back in again, or restart your system, to ensure snap’s paths are updated correctly.

To test your system, install the hello-world snap and make sure it runs correctly:

$ sudo snap install hello-world
hello-world 6.3 from Canonical✓ installed
$ hello-world
Hello World!

Snap is now installed and ready to go! If you’re using a desktop, a great next step is to install the Snap Store app.

If you’re running Lubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or later, including Lubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Lubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), you don’t need to do anything. Snap is already installed and ready to go.

This is absolutely not accurate for Lubuntu, which has not had snapd installed by default through 18.04 due to this flavor’s omission of Recommended packages by default. Including it by default in Lubuntu had also been blocked by Bug #1730159 “Snapd should not start if there are no Snaps insta...” : Bugs : snapd package : Ubuntu which is now resolved, but did not result in changes to the Lubuntu images in time for 18.04.2.

Many thanks for this. I’ll update it now.