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  1. Blog
  2. Igor Ljubuncic

Igor Ljubuncic

Igor Ljubuncic

114 posts


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 ...


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, ...


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 ...


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 ...


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, ...


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, ...


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 ...


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 ...