Igor Ljubuncic

For many people, fast broadband connection and unlimited data are a reality. For others, they are not. If you have several Linux hosts in your (home) environment, and you’re using snaps, each of these systems will separately communicate with the Snap Store and periodically download necessary updates. This can be costly in terms of inbound

An app is an app is an app. But in the world of Linux, things are a little more nuanced. Take VLC as an example. The software may be packaged ever so slightly differently in various Linux distribution archives, even different releases of the same distribution – the av01 codec is an interesting use case

The life of an application can roughly be divided into two: everything that happens before it goes live – building, packaging, publication – and then, everything that happens after that milestone. Traditionally, on Linux, developers didn’t always have an easy way of deriving useful numbers on how their software was doing across the distro

Snaps are self-contained applications designed with ease of use, security and portability in mind. They bundle their necessary dependencies, so they can work and run without modifications across numerous Linux distributions. How many? More than 40. Yet, often when technology is strongly associated with a particular product, in this case s

Snaps are confined, self-contained applications, designed with portability and security in mind. By default, strictly confined snaps run in isolation, with minimal access to system resources. For instance, they cannot access home, network, audio, or display. To make their snaps usable, developers and publishers can declare a set of interf

Snaps are self-contained applications, isolated from the underlying operating systems by several layers of confinement. This mechanism introduces security benefits, but it may also create confusion for people who are less familiar with how snaps work and behave, especially when it comes to filesystem access. Today, we’d like to clarify so

Sometimes, applications may not run well, or they could even crash. When such issues occur, it is useful to have a consistent, reproducible method of triggering the problem, so that developers can have a reliable way and sufficient data to troubleshoot the issues and produce a fix. In the software world, the GNU Debugger (gdb)

A couple of weeks ago, we published an article about Ubuntu 16.04 entering Extended Security Maintenance (ESM), and the implications of this change for snap publishers. We talked about the different options available to developers and publishers who still may rely on the older bases in their build process – free Ubuntu Advantage (UA) toke

Open the Snap Store, click on any application you like – you will now see a page full of useful tidbits – screenshots and videos, application description, last update, license, contact data, and other information. The data shown here is often the first impression the user gets about the software, and can be a deciding

Broadly speaking, the Linux community can be divided into two camps – those who upgrade their operating systems in-vivo, whenever there is an option to do so in their distro of choice, and those who install from scratch. As it happens, the former group also tends to rarely reinstall their system when problems occur, while

Snaps are several things, all at once. They are confined, standalone Linux applications that bundle all their necessary dependencies, which means they do not need to rely on the underlying system, and can run independently of it. Snaps are also packaged as compressed Squashfs filesystems, using the .snap extension. For most users, they ar

At the end of April, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will reach the end of its five years of mainstream support and enter the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase. If you’re a snap developer, and you have built or based your snaps on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) packages and libraries, you may want to know how this milestone

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

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

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,

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