What happened to "Robot-as-a-Snap"?

ROS ROS General
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If you’re building on ROS 2, odds are you’re running Ubuntu. It’s the default for almost everyone. Over the last few years, Canonical has put a ton of engineering effort into pushing an Ubuntu Robotics ecosystem built around Snaps and Ubuntu Core.

On paper, it sounds like a dream setup for production robots:

  • Atomic & Transactional Updates: Ubuntu Core gives you atomic OS updates and transactional Snap updates. If an update breaks midway through, it automatically rolls back instead of bricking a robot in the field.

  • Version Linking: You can link snap dependencies across versions so you know everything is compatible before triggering an update across the fleet.

  • Built-in ROS 2 Tooling: Snapcraft has ROS 2 extensions and build plugins ready to go out of the box.

  • Observability & Fleet Management: Hooks into the Canonical Observability Stack (Telegraf, Prometheus, Loki) for real-time telemetry, plus Landscape to manage snap versions across your fleet.

Yet, despite all this tech being around for years, there’s surprisingly little chatter about it in the ROS 2 community. On Discourse and in forums, I rarely see people asking questions, sharing setups, or recommending snaps for production.

Instead, when people talk about shipping robots, it usually comes down to:

  1. Standard apt on Ubuntu Server: Easy to set up, but updates are fragile. A failed apt upgrade can easily leave a robot in a broken state out in the field.

  2. Docker: Great for bundling dependencies, but configuring hardware passthrough for heavy GPU workloads like VSLAM or LLMs can add friction.

  3. Yocto / Custom Embedded Linux: Gives you total control and clean atomic updates, but now your team is stuck maintaining every single system package.

Where’s the catch?

Why hasn’t the snap ecosystem become the standard way to reliably deploy software onto robot fleets?

  • Is strict confinement getting in the way of hardware access (like passing through GPUs for VSLAM/LLMs, direct serial, GPIO, or cameras)?

  • Is the developer iteration loop just too clunky compared to plain workspace builds?

  • Or are people just happier sticking with Docker or Yocto despite the maintenance headaches?

Curious to hear from anyone deploying ROS 2 in the wild: What are you actually running on your fleet, and what kept you on (or off) Snaps and Ubuntu Core?

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Because you can’t run your own snap store and if you want to a official ubuntu one it costs > ~100k euro per year (this was the price 5 years ago if I remember correctly, but it could also be 10k)