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Blog posts tagged
"snapcraft.io"

Igor Ljubuncic
14 January 2021

Productivity corner: editors, editors, editors

Apps Ubuntu tech blog

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 Ubuntu tech blog

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 Ubuntu tech blog

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 Ubuntu tech blog

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 Ubuntu tech blog

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 Ubuntu tech blog

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 Ubuntu tech blog

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 Ubuntu tech blog

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 Ubuntu tech blog

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, ...

Ian Johnson
30 October 2020

Introducing etrace – a multi-purpose application profiling tool

Desktop Ubuntu tech blog

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 end, we wrote an app ...

Igor Ljubuncic
27 October 2020

Snap speed improvements with new compression algorithm!

Desktop Ubuntu tech blog

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 ...

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