Desktop

Igor Ljubuncic
14 January 2021

Productivity corner: editors, editors, editors

Article Apps

Text editors are a curious product. On one hand, they are simple, no-nonsense digital pads for taking notes, without any embellishments or visual styling. On the other, they are powerful code and data toolboxes, allowing for a great deal of flexibility and innovation. Indeed, software developers, Web developers and...

Igor Ljubuncic
14 January 2021

Igor Ljubuncic
31 December 2020

Snaps and themes – on the path to seamless desktop integration

Article Desktop

Alongside performance, theming is one of the primary concerns for desktop snap users. People expect applications bundled inside snaps to look and behave just like their counterparts shipped and packaged in the traditional way in their Linux distributions, and any discrepancy in this space can lead to a degraded user...

Igor Ljubuncic
31 December 2020

Ian Johnson
23 December 2020

Why LZO was chosen as the new compression method

Article Desktop

Everyone wants fast applications. Recently, we provided a mechanism to make snap applications launch faster by using the LZO format. We introduced this change because users reported desktop snaps starting more slowly than the same applications distributed via traditional, native Linux packaging formats like Deb or RPM....

Ian Johnson
23 December 2020

Alan Pope
10 December 2020

Snaps: How we got here

Article Desktop

I’m celebrating nine years at Canonical, and coming up on 15 years since I started contributing to Ubuntu in the community. It’s been quite the ride, helping build, support and advocate for the most popular Linux desktop, and most used Linux distribution in the cloud. Over those years, we’ve strived to make it easy for

Alan Pope
10 December 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
4 December 2020

When you need the numbers just right – benchmark and profiling applications in the Snap Store

Article Cloud and server

The world of software is a vast and complex one, often too difficult to easily assess by human intuition alone. Which is why detailed and accurate measurements of software behavior are essential in helping us understand and gauge how well our applications perform. The Snap Store has a fair share of productivity tools...

Igor Ljubuncic
4 December 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
13 November 2020

Popular snaps per distro (2020 edition)

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
13 November 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
5 November 2020

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

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
5 November 2020

Rui Vasconcelos
4 November 2020

Deploying Kubeflow everywhere: desktop, edge, and IoT devices

Article AI

Kubeflow, the ML toolkit on K8s, now fits on your desktop and edge devices! 🚀 Data science workflows on Kubernetes Kubeflow provides the cloud-native interface between Kubernetes and data science tools: libraries, frameworks, pipelines, and notebooks. > Read more about what is Kubeflow Cloud-native MLOps toolkit gets...

Rui Vasconcelos
4 November 2020

Rhys Davies
2 November 2020

Raspberry Pi 400 with Ubuntu support

Article Desktop

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a new product — the Raspberry Pi 400. The flagship Raspberry Pi 4 was released in June 2019. Since, they added an 8GB model, brought out the Compute Module 4, we certified all Raspberry Pis since Raspberry Pi 2 and we worked together to make the full Ubuntu Desktop ‘just

Rhys Davies
2 November 2020

Ian Johnson
30 October 2020

Introducing etrace – a multi-purpose application profiling tool

Article Desktop

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...

Ian Johnson
30 October 2020

haydenb
29 October 2020

New installation options coming for Ubuntu on WSL

Article Desktop

The experience of installing Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) just keeps getting better. Beginning in Windows 10 Insiders Preview build 20246, released today by Microsoft, users can enable a complete WSL experience with simply: This will enable WSL 2, download and install the latest WSL 2 Linux kernel, and...

haydenb
29 October 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
27 October 2020

Snap speed improvements with new compression algorithm!

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
27 October 2020

Rhys Davies
22 October 2020

Build a Raspberry Pi Desktop with an Ubuntu heart

Article Desktop

On the 22nd October 2020, Canonical released an Ubuntu Desktop image optimised for the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s 4GB and 8GB boards work out of the box with everything users expect from an Ubuntu Desktop. It is our honour to contribute an optimised Ubuntu Desktop image to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s...

Rhys Davies
22 October 2020

nilayshrugged
1 October 2020

Dell brings new Intel 11th gen Core processors to the XPS 13 Developer Edition

Desktop Desktop

This week, Dell announced the availability of its XPS 13 Developer Edition, preloaded with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, has been updated with Intel’s® new 11th generation core™ processors. This is the first laptop to preload Linux together with Intel’s 10nm Tiger Lake processor. The XPS 13 Developer Edition is focused on bringing...

nilayshrugged
1 October 2020

All you need to know about the fast, free, and user friendly Ubuntu desktop operating system.

All you need to know about the fast, free, and user friendly
Ubuntu desktop operating system.