Blog posts written by Igor Ljubuncic

Igor Ljubuncic
5 July 2022

Behind open DORS – Conference organizers share their thoughts on Canonical, Ubuntu, snaps, and open-source

Ubuntu Article

A Linux conference almost as old as Linux itself. In mid-May, DORS/CLUC hosted its 29th event at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, Croatia. With a long history of participation and contribution to open source communities, Canonical was one of the sponsors at the conference, with a busy schedule that included a ...

Igor Ljubuncic
24 June 2022

The new classic confinement in snaps – Even the classics need a change

Ubuntu Article

As part of their fundamental, security-driven design, snaps are meant to run isolated from the underlying system. In most cases, the idea works well, and granular access to system resources using the mechanism of interfaces allows snap developers to ship their applications packaged with strict confinement. However, there are some scenario ...

Igor Ljubuncic
17 May 2022

Snapping PhotoNoteBook: Lessons from the kitchen table, or: How an Android app got converted to a Linux snap

Ubuntu Article

This article was written by Alan Watson, with only small cosmetic changes from me. Having stumbled upon PhotoNoteBook, I asked Alan to write a guest blog post and share his project with the wider snap developer community. ===== The idea for PhotoNoteBook was seeded in 2018 after watching a Double-Glazing salesman measure my windows. He ...

Igor Ljubuncic
6 May 2022

Linux Application Summit 2022 – And there we were all in one place …

Ubuntu Article

In the last two days of April, the small, picturesque town of Rovereto in northern Italy was the location of this year’s Linux Application Summit (LAS). After a virtual-only experience during the pandemic, the LAS returned with a physical presence, and so did we. Canonical has long recognized the value and importance of LAS as ...

Igor Ljubuncic
14 April 2022

Private shared memory support for snaps

Ubuntu Article

At first glance, the title of this article may sound like an oxymoron. However, what it highlights is the introduction of a rather useful feature that will enable a far more robust and elegant handling of the /dev/shm implementation inside the snap sandbox. This will make snap development easier, more secure, and reduce potential bugs ...

Igor Ljubuncic
17 March 2022

KDE snaps performance revving up

Ubuntu Article

Speed, or rather, responsiveness is an essential part of the software usage experience. This applies to every technology and domain, snaps included. Indeed, when it comes to snaps, the equation is a bit more complicated and slightly less straightforward because snaps are packaged as compressed, standalone applications and wrapped in a num ...

Igor Ljubuncic
25 February 2022

Three ways to package your Electron apps as snaps

Ubuntu Article

Software comes in many shapes and forms. One of the popular cross-platform, cross-architecture frameworks for building and distributing applications in Electron, which combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js runtime. This makes Electron-based applications relatively easy to create. If you want to deploy Electron apps in Lin ...

Igor Ljubuncic
8 February 2022

How Snapcraft helps developers map out their application dependencies and efficiently build snaps

Ubuntu Article

One of the core concepts of snaps is cross-distro compatibility. Developers can build their snaps once, and they should run well on more than 40 different Linux distros. But how does one take care of all the required runtime dependencies? By providing them inside the snap, as part of the bundle. In the snap ecosystem, ...

Igor Ljubuncic
21 January 2022

Let’s build a snap together – a complex snapcraft.yaml walkthrough

Ubuntu Article

It has been a while since we talked about how to build snaps. In the past, we went through a number of detailed examples, focused on different programming languages and the use of various useful components that can be declared in snapcraft.yaml, like extensions, stage packages, layouts, and more. Today, we want to give you ...

Igor Ljubuncic
7 January 2022

The Future of Snapcraft

Ubuntu Article

System hysteresis, when applied to software, can roughly be defined as an overall lag between desired implementation of code and actual implementation of said code. Ideally, this delay should be minimal, and programmers would be able to make instantaneous changes and improvements to their applications. In reality, things are more complex ...

Igor Ljubuncic
17 December 2021

Snapcrafters – One for all, all for one

Ubuntu Article

In mid-2017, a small group of techies banded together and formed a team that would specialize in creating community-supported snaps of applications for which there was or would be no upstream support. This team called itself: Snapcrafters. Over time, it slowly, gradually grew, attracting more people and bringing yet more snaps under its u ...

Igor Ljubuncic
3 December 2021

Ubuntu Frame – A picture is worth a thousand snaps

Internet of Things Article

The development of graphical applications intended for use on IoT devices isn’t trivial. The complexity goes beyond the usual challenges that exist in the classic desktop and server domains. One, the IoT world is much less mature. Two, developers need to take into consideration various edge cases that do not apply to hands-on devices like ...