Snap applications

Desktop
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I have transitioning over to snap version of applications that I use (other than launch time being a bit slower and mouse theme not being the same as system theme). But this morning I replaced corebird with snap version and I tried launching it twice but it did not launch. Powered up the terminal and typed in corebird and got a message:

You need to connect this snap to the gnome platform snap.

You can do this with those commands:
snap install gnome-3-26-1604
snap connect corebird:gnome-3-26-1604 gnome-3-26-1604

My question is will this sort of thing be addressed by in time for LTS? As I am sure there will be a lot of non-technical users using 18.04 and they won’t know to go into the terminal to see why their favorite snap application is not launching and what error message it shown.

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Platform snaps (technically ‘snaps which provide content interfaces’, I’m making up terminology a bit here…) like gnome-3-26-1604 are planned to be autodownloaded in snapd 2.31, this means that installing a snap that depends on a platform snap will automatically install the platform snap and ensure the application snap has access to it … when snapd 2.31 is stable.

There’s currently no release date for 2.31, but looking at previous release dates it seems likely to be out by the start of March, maybe April at the latest (accounting for the Christmas break), which means it’ll probably be out by the next LTS. That’s a lot of assumptions/guesstimating though, we won’t know for sure if it’ll be out until the snapd roadmap is updated, which I imagine will be soon (within weeks) :slight_smile:

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