Enable snaps on Manjaro i3 CE

Occasionally, when I need an application on Arch Linux that either isn’t available or is poorly maintained, I often find its available as a snapcraft/snaps package. Snaps packages are provides by Canonical and are intended as a more universal way of installing apps across distributions without modification. My preference is always to use the AUR where possible, however a handful of apps just work better from the snapstore. As usual, I’m using Manjaro i3 Community Edition but this applies to Arch Linux also.

Enable snaps

The Official Way

The official way according to their site is to manually download the git repository from github.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/snapd.git
[andy@home-pc ~]$ cd snapd
[andy@home-pc snapd]$ 

Then issue the make command.

[andy@home-pc snapd]$ makepkg -si

And then enable the service.

$ sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket

And create the following symbolic link.

sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/snap /snap

You should now be able to use the snapstore to install snaps.

Using pacman/pamac

However the easier method seems to be to simply install it using pacman/pamac. You can search for it with.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ pamac search snapd
snapd-glib                                                                                                                 1.54-1    extra 
    Library to allow GLib/Qt based applications access to snapd, the daemon that controls Snaps
snapd                                                                                                                      2.51.3-2  extra 
    Service and tools for management of snap packages.

And install it with.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ pamac install snapd

You still need to enable and start the snapd.service. You can do both with the following.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket

You will also need to create the symbolic link.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/snap /snap
[andy@home-pc ~]$ ls -la /snap
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Nov 10 11:49 /snap -> /var/lib/snapd/snap

That should be it – you’re ready to try installing an app!

Testing snaps

Check the version with.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ snap version
snap     2.51.3-2
snapd    2.51.3-2
series   16
manjaro  -
kernel   5.13.19-2-MANJARO

Check to see if anything is installed.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.

Everything looks good! If you know what you want to install, try it out. For example, to install spotify, run:

[andy@home-pc ~]$ sudo snap install spotify

See this article for more information on how to use snap package manager.