Ubuntu Core Desktop Seeing KDE Plasma Snap'ed Up, Other Ubuntu 24.10 Progress

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Core Desktop Seeing KDE Plasma Snap'ed Up, Other Ubuntu 24.10 Progress

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical is out with a new status update on Ubuntu 24.10 development and related ambitions. This also includes more details about bringing the KDE Plasma desktop to Ubuntu Core Desktop in Snap form...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-24.10-September

[Topolino]

Canonical is pretty smart. Some desktops now struggle with basic Debian packaging and has migrated to Fedora. Snapd and immutable versioning allow for even small teams to get something in the hands of users. Ubuntu can stay host distribution and promote snap.

Of course nothing beats proper packaging done by a team of professionals.

[scottishduck]

Despite the hate, Snaps are becoming increasingly useful and providing more features than the competing technology.

[ahrs]

Of course nothing beats proper packaging done by a team of professionals.

Unfortunately those professionals are in short supply. Debian can't even get Plasma 6 packaged outside of an unstable repo and Kubuntu can't even offer a backport repo. It's no wonder then that people get excited by the prospect of being able to "snap install" an up-to-date desktop environment.

[MadWatch]

I hope Ubuntu completely gets rid of packages and use snaps for everything. That's not because I think snap is that good. That's because I'm sick and tired of application developers distributing their apps as packages or, even worse, PPA.

[bple2137]

I wonder if I’ll be able to install recent Plasma on Ubuntu LTS instead of being stuck with old version till the next LTS is offered in 2026. That would be neat. The system base would then no longer matter to me

[uid313]

This is great but I wish Canonical could package more snaps or partners to package snaps for server and development stuff so you could run Ubuntu Core on a server.

I would like to see Apache HTTP Server, Lighttpd, Nginx, Cockpit, Deno, Bun, MySQL, MariaSQL, PostgreSQL and Valkey packaged as a Snap.

[ahrs]

This is great but I wish Canonical could package more snaps or partners to package snaps for server and development stuff so you could run Ubuntu Core on a server.

I would like to see Apache HTTP Server, Lighttpd, Nginx, Cockpit, Deno, Bun, MySQL, MariaSQL, PostgreSQL and Valkey packaged as a Snap.

How would packaging of something like Nginx as a Snap work? In particular all of its modules? I don't use Ubuntu as a server but do use Nginx and tend to use a lot of different modules with it. Would content snaps work for that? If so I think that would be genuinely useful to a lot of people if anyone could publish an Nginx module as a Snap rather than having to compile it from source or install a .deb package for it. I guess you would have trouble keeping the modules in Sync though. The last thing you'd want is your web server to update and then have it break.

[Smurphy]

Hate when they put things into snaps. The reason to have shared libraries is to share them. Not pack them into a snap and bloat the disks again.

[uid313]

How would packaging of something like Nginx as a Snap work? In particular all of its modules? I don't use Ubuntu as a server but do use Nginx and tend to use a lot of different modules with it. Would content snaps work for that? If so I think that would be genuinely useful to a lot of people if anyone could publish an Nginx module as a Snap rather than having to compile it from source or install a .deb package for it. I guess you would have trouble keeping the modules in Sync though. The last thing you'd want is your web server to update and then have it break.

I dont know, but I was thinking it would be pretty cool to run Ubuntu Core on something like a Raspberry Pi as a server, but Ubuntu Core cannot install any .deb packages, it can only install Snap packages so then I would need some server software packages as snaps.