Blog posts written by Igor Ljubuncic

Igor Ljubuncic
31 December 2020

Snaps and themes – on the path to seamless desktop integration

Desktop Article

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 ...

Igor Ljubuncic
4 December 2020

When you need the numbers just right – benchmark and profiling applications in the Snap Store

Cloud and server Article

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 Article

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 Article

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 Article

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, ...

Igor Ljubuncic
27 October 2020

Snap speed improvements with new compression algorithm!

Desktop Article

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 ...

Igor Ljubuncic
1 October 2020

How to make snaps and configuration management tools work together

Cloud and server Article

In environments with large numbers of client machines, configuration management tools are often used to simplify and standardize the target state of each host in a seamless, automated and consistent manner. Software like CFEngine, Chef, Ansible, and others offer a high degree of granular control over software packaging and system configur ...

Igor Ljubuncic
18 September 2020

The Expandables – snapcraft extensions and the secret code

Desktop Article

If you’re a snap developer, you know that snap development is terribly easy. Or rather complex and difficult. Depending on your application code and requirements, it can take a lot of effort putting together the snapcraft.yaml file from which you will build your snap. One of our goals is to make snap development practically easier ...

Igor Ljubuncic
15 September 2020

Security corner: snap interface & snap connections

Cloud and server Article

One of the defining features of snaps is their strong security. Snaps are designed to run isolated from the underlying system, with granular control and access to specific resources made possible through a mechanism of interfaces. Think of it as a virtual USB cable – an interface connects a plug with a slot. Security and ...

Igor Ljubuncic
27 August 2020

Snapcraft corner: Staying on track

Desktop Article

Snapcraft channels and, consequently, tracks are an important, highly useful element of the snap ecosystem. Tracks enable snap developers to publish multiple supported releases of their application under the same snap name. All snaps must have a default track – called latest, but there can be many others, giving both developers flexibilit ...

Igor Ljubuncic
20 August 2020

Tour of the snap developer account in the Snap Store

Desktop Article

Sometimes, you may wonder, what’s on the other side of the curtain? If you’re a developer contemplating snaps, you surely want to know the range of tools and options available in the developer account dashboard in the Snap Store. But some of the features may not necessarily be immediately visible or relevant until you’ve uploaded ...

Igor Ljubuncic
23 July 2020

Complex problems, clever solutions – unique containers and virtualization snaps

Desktop Article

Snaps come in many shapes and forms: security tools, productivity apps, games, handy utilities, video editing software, and more. Often, most snap package a single application. But snaps can also include services, databases, as well as multiple binaries. How far can this concept scale, you ask? Quite far. There are also some rather unique ...