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Blog posts tagged
"snapcraft.io"


Alan Pope
12 March 2021

All About That Base

Ubuntu Article

Snapcraft is our delightful tool for building snaps. It’s not the only way to build them, but it’s certainly a popular one.  A benefit of Snapcraft is that typically a developer can configure the packaging definition once, and not have to update it for a long time. Snapcraft will keep cranking out releases, via CI ...


Igor Ljubuncic
4 March 2021

Honey, I Shrunk the Snap!

Desktop Article

The year is 1989. I bought a computer game called F-16: Combat Pilot, a flight simulator featuring free-flight, five types of single-player missions, a full campaign mode, serial-port multiplayer, and then some. Gloriously wrapped in four colors and magnetized on two single-density 5.25-inch floppy disks. Total size: 680 KB. Nowadays, it ...


Rhys Davies
26 February 2021

What is virtualisation? The basics

Desktop Article

Virtualisation plays a huge role in almost all of today’s fastest-growing software-based industries. It is the foundation for most cloud computing, the go-to methodology for cross-platform development, and has made its way all the way to ‘the edge’; the eponymous IoT. This article is the first in a series where we explain what virtualisat ...


Igor Ljubuncic
11 February 2021

How to keep your Linux disk usage nice and tidy and save space

Desktop Article

Everyone loves a clean, tidy home (hopefully). This also includes your other home – slash home, the Linux home directory. Disk cleanup and management utilities are extremely popular in Windows, but not so much in Linux. This means that users who want to do a bit of housekeeping in their distro may not necessarily have ...


Igor Ljubuncic
28 January 2021

Want to publish a snap? Here’s a list of dos and don’ts

Desktop Article

Technology is a medium that enables us to achieve things in life, ideally in a pleasant way. In the software world, operating systems, programming languages and application frameworks are the tools of the trade. But you need the right tool for the right job. If you’re thinking about writing or porting your code to snaps, ...


Alan Pope
21 January 2021

Compact and Bijou

Ubuntu Development

Snaps are designed to be self-contained packages of binaries, libraries and other assets. A snap might end up being quite bulky if the primary application it contains has many additional dependencies. This is a by-product of the snap needing to run on any Linux distribution where dependencies cannot always be expected to be installed. Thi ...


Igor Ljubuncic
14 January 2021

Productivity corner: editors, editors, editors

Apps Article

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 entrepreneuring nerds w ...


Alan Pope
7 January 2021

Time to Branch Out

Ubuntu Article

Branches are an under-used but important feature of the Snap Store publishing capabilities. Indeed as I’m writing this post, I’ve never had a need to use the feature, and I’ve been publishing snaps for four and a half years. Let’s fix that! Start with acorns The rationale for branches is simple. Each snap in the ...


Igor Ljubuncic
31 December 2020

Snaps and themes – on the path to seamless desktop integration

Desktop Article

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 experience. Over the y ...


Ian Johnson
23 December 2020

Why LZO was chosen as the new compression method

Desktop Article

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. After a thorough in ...


Alan Pope
10 December 2020

Snaps: How we got here

Desktop Article

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 ...


Igor Ljubuncic
4 December 2020

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

Cloud and server Article

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 and utilities, ...