Igor Ljubuncic

Igor Ljubuncic

113 posts

Igor Ljubuncic
26 March 2021

What’s in a snap?

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
26 March 2021

Igor Ljubuncic
23 March 2021

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

Article Cloud and server

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

Igor Ljubuncic
23 March 2021

Igor Ljubuncic
4 March 2021

Honey, I Shrunk the Snap!

Article Desktop

The year is 1989. I bought a computer game called F-16: Combat Pilot, a flight simulator featuring free-flight, five types of single-player missions, a full campaign mode, serial-port multiplayer, and then some. Gloriously wrapped in four colors and magnetized on two single-density 5.25-inch floppy disks. Total size:...

Igor Ljubuncic
4 March 2021

Igor Ljubuncic
11 February 2021

How to keep your Linux disk usage nice and tidy and save space

Article Desktop

Everyone loves a clean, tidy home (hopefully). This also includes your other home – slash home, the Linux home directory. Disk cleanup and management utilities are extremely popular in Windows, but not so much in Linux. This means that users who want to do a bit of housekeeping in their distro may not necessarily have

Igor Ljubuncic
11 February 2021

Igor Ljubuncic
28 January 2021

Want to publish a snap? Here’s a list of dos and don’ts

Article Desktop

Technology is a medium that enables us to achieve things in life, ideally in a pleasant way. In the software world, operating systems, programming languages and application frameworks are the tools of the trade. But you need the right tool for the right job. If you’re thinking about writing or porting your code to snaps,

Igor Ljubuncic
28 January 2021

Igor Ljubuncic
14 January 2021

Productivity corner: editors, editors, editors

Article Apps

Text editors are a curious product. On one hand, they are simple, no-nonsense digital pads for taking notes, without any embellishments or visual styling. On the other, they are powerful code and data toolboxes, allowing for a great deal of flexibility and innovation. Indeed, software developers, Web developers and...

Igor Ljubuncic
14 January 2021

Igor Ljubuncic
31 December 2020

Snaps and themes – on the path to seamless desktop integration

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
31 December 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
4 December 2020

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

Article Cloud and server

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
4 December 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
13 November 2020

Popular snaps per distro (2020 edition)

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
13 November 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
5 November 2020

The Hunt for Rogue Time – How we investigated and solved the Chromium snap slow startup problem

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
5 November 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
27 October 2020

Snap speed improvements with new compression algorithm!

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
27 October 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
1 October 2020

How to make snaps and configuration management tools work together

Article Cloud and server

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
1 October 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
18 September 2020

The Expandables – snapcraft extensions and the secret code

Article Desktop

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...

Igor Ljubuncic
18 September 2020

Igor Ljubuncic
15 September 2020

Security corner: snap interface & snap connections

Article Cloud and server

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
15 September 2020

  1. Previous page
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. Next page