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Blog posts tagged
"snapcraft"


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
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, ...


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 ...


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 ...


Kyle Fazzari
17 August 2020

How to build a snap using ROS 2 Foxy

Robotics Article

The snapcraft CLI (the tool used to create snaps) has long had support for building snaps that use both ROS 1 and ROS 2. ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy is the latest ROS 2 LTS, which runs on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). The snapcraft CLI recently gained experimental support for building Foxy snaps, so I wanted ...


Alan Pope
25 June 2020

Split Personality Snaps

Internet of Things Article

Broadly speaking, most snaps in the Snap Store fall into one of two categories, desktop applications and server daemons. The graphical applications such as Chromium and Spotify use desktop files, which ensure they can be opened on demand by any user via a menu or launcher. The server applications such as NextCloud and AdGuard-Home typical ...


Igor Ljubuncic
5 June 2020

Fabrica – Your self-hosted snap factory

Cloud and server Article

There are many ways one can go about building snaps. You can do it on your local system, by manually running commands in a terminal window. If you have a developer account in the Snap Store, you can use the integrated build functionality to create snaps. You can also use Launchpad, Electron Builder or a ...


Igor Ljubuncic
29 May 2020

Snapcraft development tips: how to troubleshoot snaps with services

Cloud and server Article

In the past, we have discussed various ways on how to debug and troubleshoot potential issues during snap development. The ability to quickly iterate, resolve build process hurdles and publish the application in a timely manner is essential to a robust, positive development experience. Today, we would like to outline a few basic tips and ...