While some distributions opt to be “bleeding edge”, and allow highly streamlined updates from developers to make it through to end users with a minimal amount of testing, many other (and most mainstream) distributions opt for periodical release cycles, whereby critical security updates (and some important bugfixes) can be made and pushed out quickly, but generally most other significant updates will be held until the next big release of the distribution. (Linux repositories preceded the popularity of “app stores”, but it’s basically the same idea.) Part of the differentiation between competing Linux distributions is how (and how often) they curate their repositories. managed collections of software, and tooling baked into the distributions to allow installing and updating software from these repositories. The status quo for obtaining software for Linux distributions until fairly recently was the idea of repositories, i.e.

The problem that’s being addressed in this case is that of software distribution. As is standard operating procedure in the Linux ecosystem, competing systems are vying to become a standard to solve a particular problem, and as usual we’ll end up with segmented user bases, inefficient use of sparse developer resources, and multiple ways to achieve the same thing. Here’s an example:Īside from this notification apparently not being tied properly into the KDE notification system (it doesn’t show in the list of recent notifications that’s available from the system tray notifications widget, and so therefore seems to be using a different notification system), this highlights a particularly annoying (and anti-user) line of thinking by the Snap development team.Ī little background, before going into detail on the issue here (skip down to the next image if you’re up to speed on Linux packaging). Recent versions of Ubuntu turned on a particularly annoying feature: intrusive system notifications that warn of the pending update of a Snap managed application.

Intellij snap