Igor Ljubuncic

Quite often, getting started with new technologies is a chicken and an egg problem. You want to fall back and rely upon work done by others, so you can learn from it, and yet, as a technological pioneer, you will be facing first-of-kind issues that won’t have readily available answers. We are fully aware of

When you build snaps, the process of composing a complete snapcraft.yaml file will usually revolve around three main activities: parts, build requirements and runtime components. Sometimes, you may discover that you’re missing certain libraries in the compilation stage, or that they are required for your application to run. In most cases,

For the past few decades, the digital office formula has not changed much. It still revolves around three main components – text documents, data spreadsheets and visual slide decks, designed to convey a powerful business message. While simple in essence, this model is quite complex in practice, and choosing the best tools for the job

Simplicity is the magic ingredient in any product design. For members of the KDE community, snap development has become that much simpler, thanks to the recent introduction of the KDE neon extension. Last year, we talked about the KDE build and content snaps, which can greatly speed the build of KDE application snaps and save

If you’re looking for an easy, non-techie way to install snaps, you want a simple store-like utility. Snap integration is available in both GNOME Software and KDE Discover, which cover a large portion of the Linux user base. However, in distributions and desktop environments that do not natively provide a snap-capable graphical frontend,

An interesting aspect in the life of any technology is how it propagates. Like organisms in nature, technology follows evolutionary patterns, and sometimes, it can be difficult predicting them. But their observation can be quite telling. Case in point, Snaptastic on elementary OS. Snaptastic is a graphical snap manager utility, available

As you probably already know, snapcraft supports a range of plugins, designed to aid developers in making their snaps in an easier, faster, more transparent fashion. Plugins work with different programming languages and build tools, like Python, Java, Rust, Cmake, and others. By making complex things simpler, they can accelerate your proj

From a distance, Linux is one big, confusing ball of passionate users and hardcore technical jargon. But as you zoom in, you can start seeing patterns – and differences. Indeed, the individual and vastly varied choice of a favorite distribution has played a major part in shaping the community conversation in the Linux space. But

How are snaps different from debs? This is a common question that comes up in technical discussions in the Linux community, especially among developers and users who have just embarked on their snap journey and are interested in learning more details. Indeed, the introduction of self-contained application format likes snaps has created a

Overall, most Linux distributions offer sane, reasonable defaults that balance security and functionality quite well. However, most of the security mechanisms are transparent, running in the background, and you still might require some additional, practical software to bolster your security array. Back in July, we talked about handy produ

Slow applications are never fun. But not knowing why an application is not behaving correctly can be even more frustrating. A well-designed system that can diagnose performance or startup issues and inform the user about the problem goes a long way toward mitigating the frustration, and may even help resolve the root cause altogether. Bac

Discovery is an integral part of any store experience. Sometimes, you know what you want and need, and the experience can be short and transactional. On other occasions, you want to explore, and search for new things. This applies equally to shopping malls as it does to software. In this article, we would like to

As you probably know, there are many ways you can build snaps: locally using snapcraft, with CI systems like Travis, through Launchpad, and also via the free online Snapcraft Build Service. Now, a new preview feature called Remote build also allows you to build snaps for multiple architectures directly from the command line. This has

Recently, we published several blog posts, aimed at helping developers enjoy a smoother, faster, more streamlined experience creating snaps. We discussed the tools and tricks you can employ in snapcraft to accelerate the speed at which you iterate on your builds. We want to continue the work presented in the Make your snap development fas

Over the past several months, we have shared with you several articles and tutorials showing how to accelerate application development so that a typically demanding, time-consuming process becomes an easier, faster and more fun one. Today, we’d like to introduce some additional tips and tricks. Namely, we want to talk about elegant ways y

In Linux, testing software is both easy and difficult at the same time. While the repository channels offer great availability to software, you can typically only install a single instance of an application. If you want to test multiple instances, you will most likely need to configure the remainder yourself. With snaps, this is a