Desktop archives
692 posts
Honey, I Shrunk the Snap!
By Igor Ljubuncic, 4 March 2021
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...
What is virtualisation? The basics
By Rhys Davies, 26 February 2021
Virtualisation plays a huge role in almost all of today’s fastest-growing software-based industries. It is the foundation for most cloud computing, the go-to...
Regex basics
By Robin Winslow, 18 February 2021
An overview of regex and how to use it, from a few different angles. Including appropriate warnings like ‘avoid regex’.
How to keep your Linux disk usage nice and tidy and save space
By Igor Ljubuncic, 11 February 2021
Everyone loves a clean, tidy home (hopefully). This also includes your other home – slash home, the Linux home directory. Disk cleanup and management...
Getting started with Flutter on Ubuntu
By Alan Pope, 8 February 2021
This is a guest post authored by Dani Llewellyn. It was originally featured on her blog, we’re reproducing it here with Dani’s permission. Dani is an active...
Want to publish a snap? Here’s a list of dos and don’ts
By Igor Ljubuncic, 28 January 2021
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...
Productivity corner: editors, editors, editors
By Igor Ljubuncic, 14 January 2021
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...
Snaps and themes – on the path to seamless desktop integration
By Igor Ljubuncic, 31 December 2020
Alongside performance, theming is one of the primary concerns for desktop snap users. People expect applications bundled inside snaps to look and behave just...
Why LZO was chosen as the new compression method
By Ian Johnson, 23 December 2020
Everyone wants fast applications. Recently, we provided a mechanism to make snap applications launch faster by using the LZO format. We introduced this change...
Snaps: How we got here
By Alan Pope, 10 December 2020
I’m celebrating nine years at Canonical, and coming up on 15 years since I started contributing to Ubuntu in the community. It’s been quite the ride, helping...
When you need the numbers just right – benchmark and profiling applications in the Snap Store
By Igor Ljubuncic, 4 December 2020
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...
Popular snaps per distro (2020 edition)
By Igor Ljubuncic, 13 November 2020
Back in mid-2019, we wrote a blog post detailing and comparing the most popular snaps across multiple distributions – Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora,...