Ubuntu announced it is postponing its plans to transition the CUPS printing stack in Ubuntu to a snap instead of native DEBs.

Snap is the containerized format that Canonical is pushing in Ubuntu. Linux application packages traditionally pull in any dependencies they need, but this can occasionally cause conflicts if different apps require different versions of the same dependency.

Snap — as well as the competing Flatpak format — are packages that contain all of their necessary dependencies. As a result, dependency conflicts are completely eliminated. In addition, slowermoving stable Linux distros like Debian and Ubuntu LTS can still have the latest packages since the self-contained snaps and Flatpaks don’t need the underlying system to be the latest and greatest.

While a number of distros support Flatpak, Snap was developed by Ubuntu. The distro has been increasingly using snaps for some applications and packages and was planning on migrating the CUPS printing stack to a snap in version 23.10.

According to Ubuntu’s Till Kamppeter, CUPS will continue to use the native DEB format for 23.10 and instead make the switch in 24.04.

We have decided to revert to DEB-package based printing and move the switchover out to Ubuntu 24.10.

We are now already long after Feature Freeze and shortly before User Interface Freeze and the desktop integration has taken longer than expected. Especially also the needs of printer setup tools for the flavors need some additional time. Also GNOME Control Center is undergoing a major UI modernization and we need to merge with it. And for providing the Common Print Dialog backends in Snap, the session D-Bus support in snapd needs to get finally released.

To not do high-impact changes in an LTS we will skip 24.04 LTS and do the switchover in 24.10 at the earliest. For the time being I keep the DEB package as much in sync as possible with Debian’s packages.