Month of KDE Applications Snaps

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Snaps is a fancy new package format for Linux which allows applications to be shipped which run on pretty much any Linux distro. This nicely solves one of the headaches with shipping software for Linux, that you have to package it a dozen times using a dozen different methods to get anyone to be able to install it.

The format and host for Snaps is made using Ubuntu and developed by KDE patron Canonical.

We have been working on building Snaps from the KDE neon builders for some time and they’re now at a quality where we can move them into the stable channel. (Snap software gets hosted in channels depending on the risk you want to take, others being candidate, beta and edge.)

If you’re a Plasma user you can use Discover to install the Snaps, but of course they work equally well on other desktops with other package managers or using the snap command.

This month the Snap team are highlighting KDE’s stable Snaps on their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Here’s what we’ve seen so far:

There’s still plenty of KDE apps that need tweaks before they can go in the Snap stable channel. If you’re an app maintainer then come and talk to us (in #kde-neon probably) about how your app can be distributed. We plan on doing some automated QA so they don’t need manual review before publishing and before long hopefully we can move much of the build details into the app repo rather than the KDE neon repo.