I am a long-time Ubuntu user and community contributor. I love how open-source communities generally work, sure there are hiccups, like companies mandating decisions that aren’t popular amongst the community. The idea of I being able to fix an issue and getting that released to hundreds of thousands of people is just priceless for me.
For the long time, I have distinguished some issues in Linux on the desktop that I want fixed. Biggest is always having the latest version of the software I use. Think of Android for example, you always get the latest version of the app, directly from the developers with no package maintainer in between. That’s the ideal scenario but for us currently on Linux it may not be possible in all cases because of the fragmentation we have.
Snaps, I believe tries to solve that.
Whenever I find a new software that I want to install these days, the first thing I do is search the snap store (snap find my_query). I have found some unexpected snaps while doing that but other times I faced disappointment. On a personal level I have slowly started to fix that. I published Android Studio as a snap, Sublime Text is work-in-progress and I am looking into snapping Keybase.
The other apps that are absolutely important for me are already available, like PyCharm and Slack.
I have also discovered that MySQL and Firefox to some extent have their snaps there, which is super awesome.
The great thing today is that most new open-source projects are doing development on GitHub, so we can just go and contribute snap support for a project and quickly get automatic builds on build.snapcraft.io. I hope more people who care about Ubuntu, and Linux in general get behind this effort and make application delivery on Linux the best amongst all Desktop OSes.
Its time to put our egos aside and work for a larger cause.
Omer's Blog 