The project Unsnap is developing a utility that allows the transfer of Snap packages to Flatpak format. This utility not only replaces the Snap package manager with Flatpak, but also selects and installs Flatpak equivalents for the already installed Snap packages. The aim is for users to have a similar set of applications, but installed in the Flatpak format. The code is written in Shell and is licensed under MIT.
The migration process involves several steps. Firstly, Unsnap generates a set of Shell scripts that outline the replacement operations. Based on the system’s current state, separate scripts are created for copying the Snap environment backward, installing the Flatpak package manager, enabling Flatpak repositories, and installing Flatpak equivalents for the Snap packages already available in the system. Users can edit these automatically generated scripts according to their preferences before running them.
The project is developed by Alan Pope, one of the Snap system developers who resigned from Canonical in 2021 after a decade of work at the company. The tools are still considered experimental (pre-alpha) and are limited to Ubuntu support at present. However, Unsnap plans to expand support to other distributions that also support Snap, such as Manjaro, Linux Mint, Zorin, Debian, Fedora, Pop_os!, Kde Neon, Raspbian, Centos, and Elementary OS. Interested users can find the project’s list of packages available in both Snap and Flatpak formats.
Other close-related projects by the author of Unsnap include custom-desktop (a set of scripts for converting the already installed Ubuntu environment) and deb-get (an Apt-GET analog for working with Deb packages located in third-party repositories or websites). The DEB-GET project also provides ready-made metadata for installing third-party packages that can be used to replace Snap packages with Deb (e.g., installing Google Chrome Stable using Deb-Get).