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Blog posts tagged
"snapcraft.io"


Holly Hall
24 June 2021

A technical introduction to the Snap Store Proxy

Internet of Things Article

In the world of IoT, it is crucial to be fully in control of your devices. Over-the-air (OTA) updates are essential for a distributed set of devices. This must be carefully managed to ensure that an update is not pushed at a time where the device is active and operation should not be interrupted. To ...


Igor Ljubuncic
18 June 2021

How’s my snap faring on different distributions?

Ubuntu Article

The life of an application can roughly be divided into two: everything that happens before it goes live – building, packaging, publication – and then, everything that happens after that milestone. Traditionally, on Linux, developers didn’t always have an easy way of deriving useful numbers on how their software was doing across the distro ...


Igor Ljubuncic
11 June 2021

What has snapd ever done for other distros?

Ubuntu Article

Snaps are self-contained applications designed with ease of use, security and portability in mind. They bundle their necessary dependencies, so they can work and run without modifications across numerous Linux distributions. How many? More than 40. Yet, often when technology is strongly associated with a particular product, in this case s ...


Igor Ljubuncic
4 June 2021

The magic behind snap interfaces

Ubuntu Article

Snaps are confined, self-contained applications, designed with portability and security in mind. By default, strictly confined snaps run in isolation, with minimal access to system resources. For instance, they cannot access home, network, audio, or display. To make their snaps usable, developers and publishers can declare a set of interf ...


Igor Ljubuncic
28 May 2021

Hey snap, where’s my data?

Desktop Article

Snaps are self-contained applications, isolated from the underlying operating systems by several layers of confinement. This mechanism introduces security benefits, but it may also create confusion for people who are less familiar with how snaps work and behave, especially when it comes to filesystem access. Today, we’d like to clarify so ...


Igor Ljubuncic
13 May 2021

How to troubleshoot application issues and crashes with snapd gdbserver

Apps Article

Sometimes, applications may not run well, or they could even crash. When such issues occur, it is useful to have a consistent, reproducible method of triggering the problem, so that developers can have a reliable way and sufficient data to troubleshoot the issues and produce a fix. In the software world, the GNU Debugger (gdb) ...


Igor Ljubuncic
7 May 2021

The snap developer’s guide on how to migrate to new bases

Apps Article

A couple of weeks ago, we published an article about Ubuntu 16.04 entering Extended Security Maintenance (ESM), and the implications of this change for snap publishers. We talked about the different options available to developers and publishers who still may rely on the older bases in their build process – free Ubuntu Advantage (UA) toke ...


Igor Ljubuncic
23 April 2021

Better snap metadata handling coming your way soon

Ubuntu Article

Open the Snap Store, click on any application you like – you will now see a page full of useful tidbits – screenshots and videos, application description, last update, license, contact data, and other information. The data shown here is often the first impression the user gets about the software, and can be a deciding ...


Igor Ljubuncic
15 April 2021

Should you ever reinstall your Linux box? If so, how?

Desktop Article

Broadly speaking, the Linux community can be divided into two camps – those who upgrade their operating systems in-vivo, whenever there is an option to do so in their distro of choice, and those who install from scratch. As it happens, the former group also tends to rarely reinstall their system when problems occur, while ...


Rhys Davies
8 April 2021

How to make your first snap

Desktop Article

Snaps are a way to package your software so it is easy to install on Linux. If you’re a snap developer already or you’re a part of the Linux community, and you care about how software is deployed, and you’re well versed in how software is packaged, and are tuned into the discussions around packaging ...


Igor Ljubuncic
26 March 2021

What’s in a snap?

Desktop Article

Snaps are several things, all at once. They are confined, standalone Linux applications that bundle all their necessary dependencies, which means they do not need to rely on the underlying system, and can run independently of it. Snaps are also packaged as compressed Squashfs filesystems, using the .snap extension. For most users, they ar ...


Igor Ljubuncic
23 March 2021

How does Ubuntu 16.04 entering Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) affect snap publishers?

Cloud and server Article

At the end of April, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will reach the end of its five years of mainstream support and enter the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase. If you’re a snap developer, and you have built or based your snaps on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) packages and libraries, you may want to know how this milestone ...