The Snappy Team, through Canonical's Michael Vogt, has had the great pleasure of announcing on November 24, 2016, the release of the snapd 2.18 maintenance update to Ubuntu's Snappy daemon.

snapd 2.18 is here three weeks after the snapd 2.17.1 point release, bringing a large number of improvements and many fixes for the most annoying issues reported by users since then, improving the Snappy experience on Ubuntu. On top of that, the Snappy team also announced today a new candidate core snap.

"The Snappy Team are happy to announce that the 2.18 release of snapd is available on GitHub," said Michael Vogt in the release announcement. "We have also released a new version of the 'core' snap that contains this version of snapd into the 'candidate' channel. On your Ubuntu Core 16 devices please run 'snap refresh --candidate core'."

Here's what's new in snapd 2.18

Prominent new features of snapd 2.18 include the "snap info < name|path >" command for viewing details about a certain Snap package, support for the "snap find --section=< name >" command, the ability to view featured Snaps using the "snap find" command without any other arguments, and support for delta downloads on slow connections.

Additionally, snapd 2.18 addresses an issue with the "snap install/remove/refresh < snapname >" command to no longer fail if the respective Snap package is already in the sought state. You can now view progress information for in-progress changes using the "snap watch < change-id >" command, and there are also a bunch of networking improvements.

A lot of new interfaces have been added in this new snapd release, among which we can mention raw-usb, lxd-client, avahi-observe, ofono, alsa, and i2c. Support for the browser-support, process-control, and fctix interfaces was improved, and it's now possible to resume partial downloads and export per-snap XDG_RUNTIME_DIR per user.

snapd 2.18 also ships with screenshot support through the client reset API, improves handling of jailmode, adds support for displaying all Snaps revisions installed on the host system with the "snap list --all" command, along with the ability to view which Snaps have been refreshed in the generated snap change using "snap refresh" command.

Last but not least, the "snap try" command was updated to guess the correct directory when inside an unpacked Snap package or a Snapcraft project dir, and the snap login has been updated to prompt users for an email address if it hasn't been specified via command-line. snapd 2.18 is now available for Ubuntu Core 16, Ubuntu 16.10, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems.