A big thank you goes out to the Ubuntu Community for making my attendance to the KDE Akademy 2023! This was a very successful conference for me. I had very positive feedback for my speech on “A million reasons why snaps are important. I also had a productive BoF on snapping KDE applications. Most importantly I got to catch up with many old and new friends and got to put faces to the new. There were so many great talks and BoFs, but one of my favorites was the Goals as all three compliment each other. The keynote was amazing, I had no idea open source has made its way into space! How cool is that!?! Despite the high temperatures ( something I am used to, but not that humidity! ) I had a wonderful time and was able to visit many cool sites in Greece. What an amazing place.
In the snap world I haven’t had much time this month as previous months as my part time gig doing them expired a few months ago and I had to focus on some paid work which has now run out. However, I did finish a new content pack containing KDE frameworks 5.108 and Qt 5.15.10 and most of KDE release applications 23.04.2. I also got Konsole working!
I have some fixes merged into snapcraft that will fix some strange build errors reported on the forums and for myself as well. I will be creating a new PR for the new content pack as soon as testing is complete.
We will have some very exciting news coming as soon as the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted. Until then I must reach out to the community for help to “Keep the lights on” until more paid work comes in. If it wasn’t for all of you I couldn’t make all of this possible and I thank each and every one of you. This is the greatest software community ever!
July 25, 2023 at 07:56:19 AM by Darrell Prince
Linkedin really wanted me to see this post, notified me. I will be taking some deeper dives into programming soon, kinda juggling a lot of things right now, but I envision and want to build a semantic web, and have sort of a template to it, how we get there, and how we deal with the field of dreams problem, if you build it they will come doesn’t always work. (need more corn, maybe?)
I like comments on my website, and thought I’d say hi
August 18, 2023 at 07:49:39 AM by sgmoore
Thanks!
More corn! Love it 🙂
July 26, 2023 at 03:04:34 AM by kdeuser
So based on the slides these “million reasons” reffer to number of downloads?
One of the reasons why snaps “are so popular” is because (K)Ubuntu/Neon is terrible at updating libraries in repositories. Okular itself gets regular updates in Neon, but the libpoppler is pretty outdated. As a consequence, a lot of features won’t work. Often the only viable possibility (apart from compiling from source) is to use AppImages, flatpaks or snaps.
Out of these tree sollutions, I actually dislike snaps most.
Formost, due to various architecture flaws (/home is for my personal data, not application data -> makes it terrible for data recovery!). I also dislike how Cannonical is pushing them (removing flatpak etc). Flatpaks also ofer superior integration (accessing files in snap apps is messed up by default, files reguallarily get lost since places are not synced propperly – $HOME is somewhere within the snap folder, rather mapping to the actual /home).
I would still like to know, what are real benefits of snaps (compared to appimages and flatpaks)?
August 18, 2023 at 07:49:02 AM by sgmoore
Hi!
There are tons of articles out there comparing the two, so I will let everyone judge for themselves. They are all great technologies. I have built my fair share of appimages and snaps, but not flatpaks. I prefer snaps for many reasons, but mostly the great community around them. What you describe is something we are currently working out, xdg-desktop-portals are NOT working out of the box as they should be. Once solved $HOME and the other issues you described will work as expected.
Cheers,
Scarlett