Blog posts tagged
"snapcraft.io"

279 posts


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


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


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
15 October 2020

The Windows Calculator on Linux with Uno Platform

Article Internet of Things

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: ...

Rhys Davies
15 October 2020


Igor Ljubuncic
1 October 2020

How to make snaps and configuration management tools work together

Article Cloud and server

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
1 October 2020


Alan Pope
25 September 2020

Stepping Down Gracefully

Article Desktop

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...

Alan Pope
25 September 2020


Igor Ljubuncic
18 September 2020

The Expandables – snapcraft extensions and the secret code

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
18 September 2020


Igor Ljubuncic
15 September 2020

Security corner: snap interface & snap connections

Article Cloud and server

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

Igor Ljubuncic
15 September 2020


Alan Pope
10 September 2020

Snap! Collaborate and listen!

Article Desktop

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

Alan Pope
10 September 2020


Igor Ljubuncic
27 August 2020

Snapcraft corner: Staying on track

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
27 August 2020


Igor Ljubuncic
20 August 2020

Tour of the snap developer account in the Snap Store

Article Desktop

Sometimes, you may wonder, what’s on the other side of the curtain? If you’re a developer contemplating snaps, you surely want to know the range of tools and options available in the developer account dashboard in the Snap Store. But some of the features may not necessarily be immediately visible or relevant until...

Igor Ljubuncic
20 August 2020