Alan Pope

We often feature and promote applications and games in the Snap Store and via our social media channels. Perhaps unsurprisingly, games are popular among our followers, and our users. There are a few great games already in the Snap Store, but there’s always room for more! Snap lends itself well to packaging and distributing free

People frequently tell me they’d like to make a snap of an application they care about. Whether it’s in person at events like FOSDEM, or online via IRC or Telegram, there are developers who want to share their Linux software creations with the world, and snaps are designed exactly for this. We have run a

Software developers often have enough to worry about. Their focus is creating the best application they can, often without having to consider packaging. We recently discovered Akira, which illustrates this well. The small team of developers are hard at work on the application, so software packaging isn’t a high priority at the moment. Aki

With 2018 drawing to a close, and many of us spending with family during the holiday season, I thought we’d take a look back over some of our favourite Linux applications in the Snap Store. Some have been in the store for over a year, and a few landed only recently, but they’re all great.

With the holidays coming up, many of us can expect to spend time with our friends and families, often listening to seasonal music, or indeed escaping the seasonal music! Whether you’re joining in or getting away from the crowd, this simple project can help. This is part one of a series of posts where I

As part of a personal drive to be less dependent on 3rd party Internet services, I’ve moved some things in house, under my own control. This includes self-hosting important shared files, photos and media at home. Which can pose a problem if I’m away from home and want to access those files. Previously, I would

Another month passes and we’ve got a collection of applications which crossed our “desk” (Twitter feed) towards the end of 2018. Take a look down the list, and discover something new today. 1. MiniZinc MiniZinc MiniZinc is an open-source, high-level solver constraint modeling language Get MiniZinc from the Snap store or install it on the

Another month passes and we’ve got a collection of applications which crossed our “desk” (Twitter feed) during August 2018. We have a mix of social tools, music creation and curation software, password storage systems, developer tools and some fun too. Take a look down the list, and discover something new today. 1. Whalebird AkiraFukushim

Traditionally Linux users have relied on central distribution-maintained repositories to get new software. With six-month or longer spans between releases, this meant many users just put up with old versions of applications & libraries. In many cases newer software was just missing from the archives. Modern applications iterate quickly, r

Gaming on Linux doesn’t have to mean buying a ludicrously priced GPU (thanks crypto miners!). Nor does it require a beefy CPU. There’s a real resurgence in retro style gaming going on right now. We’ve pulled together a selection of retro-inspired games for you to play today, on your beloved Linux machine. You can stay

Another month, and another bumper crop of snaps for you! This time around we have a great mix of developer tools, productivity applications and of course games. All of these are available as snaps which can run on millions of Linux computers around the world. You can stay up to date with our editorial picks

Electron is one of the most popular frameworks for creating cross-platform desktop applications right now. Many developers use electron-builder to do the heavy-lifting of package management for their Electron apps. electron-builder has support for creating snap packages out of the box. Bringing your Electron desktop app to Linux can be as

In today’s modern world of multi-gigabyte browser based applications we can get overwhelmed by busy, interrupting graphical environments. Sometimes it’s nice to downsize and focus, VT100-style. So let’s leverage the power of the terminal to get stuff done with a selection of apps, utilities and a couple of games for your Linux console. Yo

Snap packages have a rich set of features beyond getting the latest shiny on your Linux distribution. Tracks enable developers to publish multiple supported releases of their application under the same name. With this enabled, a user can switch tracks at any time to install and use an alternate supported relase of software. Within each

Summer is here (sorry Southern hemisphere), and with the World Cup and Wimbledon over, it’s time for a new challenge! Background Snaps are universal Linux software packages. That means they can work anywhere, and contain anything. Whether you’re a Pythonista, a Golang developer or if C++ is your bag, Snapcraft can package your software as

Snaps introduce some new concepts to the Linux ecosystem which developers can take advantage of, and snap users need to appreciate. When installing a snap, it’s important to understand what parts of the system the application wants access to. It’s up to the user to decide to install (or not) a snap, and the confinement