Snap in Discover and the GNU/Linux Desktop

Last week I attended a sprint with the Snap team and some other members of the community. One of the things we looked into was the Software Center story at depth so I thought it’s a good moment to give you an update.

Discover’s Snap Backend

Long due, some of you have already been using the testing version of it. During this sprint it was refactored to use the snapd-glib library that should simplify a bit the maintainership of this piece of software.

I’m aiming to having a stable snap back-end for Plasma 5.11.

AppStream

One of the reasons holding us back was the lack of AppStream support both in few spaces: getting proper information from the application, leveraging the appstream identifiers. This will allow snap software centers to have rich information ready for users to better choose their software.

My understanding is that the development of these features is well under way and should be available to us soon.

Desktop integration

One of the really cool things about Snap is how well it integrates with cloud/IoT stuff. While this makes it really powerful, us desktop users and developers have seen some things that will need tackling eventually. Things like styling, fonts, icons, etc. need to be properly represented in Snap and it’s good to see this coming together nicely.

These were all subjects that were discussed during the meeting, so do get your hopes high!