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Blog posts tagged
"snapcraft.io"


Igor Ljubuncic
27 November 2020

Productivity corner: offline translation

Desktop Article

Language translation. Easily said, not easily done. Human languages have evolved over the past 30,000 years, tightly coupled to culture and collective memories of peoples, which is why, even today, we often struggle with fine nuances of meaning and context, especially when they need to be expressed in another language. But then, if we str ...


Igor Ljubuncic
13 November 2020

Popular snaps per distro (2020 edition)

Desktop Article

Back in mid-2019, we wrote a blog post detailing and comparing the most popular snaps across multiple distributions – Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, and Ubuntu. This article gave us a fascinating insight into the usage patterns across these different systems and their audiences. We wanted to see if and how the situation has ...


Igor Ljubuncic
5 November 2020

The Hunt for Rogue Time – How we investigated and solved the Chromium snap slow startup problem

Desktop Article

In October, we shared a blog post detailing significant snap startup time improvements due to the use of a new compression algorithm. In that article, we focused on the cold and hot application startups, but we did not delve much into the first-run setup scenario. While running our tests, we observed a rather interesting phenomenon, ...


Ian Johnson
30 October 2020

Introducing etrace – a multi-purpose application profiling tool

Desktop Article

These days, the internal workings of Linux applications involve many different moving parts. Sometimes, it can be rather difficult to debug them when things go wrong or run slower than expected. Tracing an application’s execution is one way of understanding potential issues without diving into the source code. To this end, we wrote an app ...


Igor Ljubuncic
27 October 2020

Snap speed improvements with new compression algorithm!

Desktop Article

Security and performance are often mutually exclusive concepts. A great user experience is one that manages to blend the two in a way that does not compromise on robust, solid foundations of security on one hand, and a fast, responsive software interaction on the other. Snaps are self-contained applications, with layered security, and as ...


Rhys Davies
15 October 2020

The Windows Calculator on Linux with Uno Platform

Internet of Things Article

The good folks in the Uno Platform community have ported the open-source Windows Calculator to Linux. And they’ve done it quicker than Microsoft could bring their browser to Linux.  The calculator is published in the snapstore and can be downloaded right away. If you’re on Ubuntu or you have snapd installed just run:  snap install ...


Igor Ljubuncic
1 October 2020

How to make snaps and configuration management tools work together

Cloud and server Article

In environments with large numbers of client machines, configuration management tools are often used to simplify and standardize the target state of each host in a seamless, automated and consistent manner. Software like CFEngine, Chef, Ansible, and others offer a high degree of granular control over software packaging and system configur ...


Alan Pope
25 September 2020

Stepping Down Gracefully

Desktop Article

The Snap Store has been designed to enable upstream developers and enthusiastic community contributors to publish snaps. As with most Linux packaging solutions, the wider community are often responsible for starting and maintaining software packages. This is a double-edged sword, especially for humans with limited life spans and other shi ...


Igor Ljubuncic
18 September 2020

The Expandables – snapcraft extensions and the secret code

Desktop Article

If you’re a snap developer, you know that snap development is terribly easy. Or rather complex and difficult. Depending on your application code and requirements, it can take a lot of effort putting together the snapcraft.yaml file from which you will build your snap. One of our goals is to make snap development practically easier ...


Igor Ljubuncic
15 September 2020

Security corner: snap interface & snap connections

Cloud and server Article

One of the defining features of snaps is their strong security. Snaps are designed to run isolated from the underlying system, with granular control and access to specific resources made possible through a mechanism of interfaces. Think of it as a virtual USB cable – an interface connects a plug with a slot. Security and ...


Alan Pope
10 September 2020

Snap! Collaborate and listen!

Desktop Article

You’d think we would be running out of terrible/great (delete as applicable) 80s songs to try and shoehorn into the titles of these blog posts. Turns out, not quite yet! “How can I help?” is a phrase often used in Open Source projects by enthusiastic users and developers. There are a lot of moving parts ...


Igor Ljubuncic
27 August 2020

Snapcraft corner: Staying on track

Desktop Article

Snapcraft channels and, consequently, tracks are an important, highly useful element of the snap ecosystem. Tracks enable snap developers to publish multiple supported releases of their application under the same snap name. All snaps must have a default track – called latest, but there can be many others, giving both developers flexibilit ...