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KDE Neon developer Harald Sitter was able to package up the KDE calculator, kcalc, in a snap that weighs in at a mere 320KB! How did he do it?

Like most applications in KDE, kcalc depends on several KDE Frameworks (though not all), sets of libraries and services that provide the common functionality and shared UI/UX found in KDE and it’s suite of applications. This means that, while kcalc is itself a small application, it’s dependency chain is not. In the past, any KDE application snap had to include many megabytes of platforms dependencies, even for the smallest app.

Recently I introduced the new “content” interface that has been added to snapd. I used this interface to share plugin code with a text editor, but Harald has taken it even further and created a KDE Frameworks snap that can share the entire platform with applications that are built on it!

While still in the very early stages of development, this approach will allow the KDE project to deliver all of their applications as independent snaps, while still letting them all share the one common set of Frameworks that they depend on. The end result will be that you, the user, will get the very latest stable (or development!) version of the KDE platform and applications, direct from KDE themselves, even if you’re on a stable/LTS release of your distro.

If you are running a snap-capable distro, you can try these experimental packages yourself by downloading kde-frameworks-5_5.26_amd64.snap and kcalc_0_amd64.snap from Neon’s build servers, and installing them with “snap install –devmode –force-dangerous <snap_file>”. To learn more about how he did this, and to help him build more KDE application snaps, you can find Harald as <sitter> on #kde-neon on Freenode IRC.