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Desktop app snap in 300KB

Posted by: Michael Hall in Archive 8 years, 1 month ago

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?

Sharing is caring, with Snaps!

Posted by: Michael Hall in Archive 8 years, 2 months ago

Snaps are a great way to get the most up to date applications on your desktop without putting the security or stability or your system at risk. I’ve been snapping up a bunch of things lately and the potential this new paradigm offers is going to be revolutionary. Unfortunately nothing comes for free, and the security of snaps comes with some necessary tradeoffs like isolation and confinement, which reduces some of the power and flexibility we’ve become used to as Linux users.

My day of convergence

Posted by: Michael Hall in Archive 8 years, 4 months ago

I’ve had a Nexus 4 since 2013, and I’ve been using it to test out desktop convergence (where you run a desktop environment from the phone) ever since that feature landed just over a year ago. Usually that meant plugging it into my TV via HDMI to make sure it automatically switched to the larger screen, and playing a bit with the traditional windowed-mode of Unity 8, or checking on adaptive layouts in some of the apps. I’ve also run it for hours on end as a demo at conferences such as SCaLE, FOSSETCON, OSCON and SELF. But through all that, I’ve never used it as an actual replacement for my laptop. Until now.

Dogfooding Unity 8

Posted by: Michael Hall in Archive 8 years, 6 months ago

During the Ubuntu Online Summit last week, my colleague Daniel Holbach came up with what he called a “10 day challenge” to some of the engineering manager directing the convergence work in Ubuntu. The idea is simple, try and use only the Unity 8 desktop for 10 working days (two weeks). I thought this was a great way to really identify how close it is to being usable by most Ubuntu users, as well as finding the bugs that cause the most pain in making the switch. So on Friday of last week, with UOS over, I took up the challenge.

New Ubuntu Community Donations report

Posted by: Michael Hall in Archive 8 years, 7 months ago

Somehow I missed the fact that I never wrote Community Donations report for Q3 2015. I only realized it because it’s time for me to start working on Q4. Sorry for the oversight, but that report is now published.

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